Transcript: Episode 0030

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Let's go!

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Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler.

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And I'm woe.

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On today's episode of Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing deism, the belief that

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what's called commonly the watchmaker theory, that there is a God, there's a creator. But

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once he set things in motion, he basically just stepped back and let things run. The

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reason we're discussing that today is that I think that Christianity has been overtaken

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by a soft form of deism. Maybe some of you even listening have some elements of this

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deistic view in your own hearts. Even while you confess the true God, deism is a non-trinitarian

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heresy and an anti-divinity heresy in some ways. But the aspect of it that is compatible

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with modern Christianity, which is to say not Christianity at all, is the belief that

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God set things in motion and he just kind of vanished. So the first half of the episode

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is going to be talking about that. And then the second half, we're going to be illustrating

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some examples of how the scripture talks about sin, specifically having temporal consequences,

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and how we fundamentally don't believe that today, even as we say that we do. And just

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as an alert to any Roman Catholic listeners, I know there are a few of you at least, when

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we're talking in that, we're going to be using completely different terminology than

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you use in your own confessions. So please don't mistake us for being in agreement. We're

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actually in complete disagreement. This is one of the reasons why we split from Rome.

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It was one of the principal reasons for the Reformation. So we're going to be using some

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of the same terms you use that mean completely different things. So this is going to be a

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polemic episode, but just know upfront, when we're saying some of those words, we are not

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talking about what you believe. A specific warning to parents before we get into this,

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towards the end, we're going to be giving an example that is necessarily graphic and a sexual

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nature. We're going to be using one or two words that you may not want to explain to your

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children today. So I'd caution you to maybe screen this episode before you listen with family,

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as we know many of you are now, and we're thankful for that. Whether or not your kids listen to

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this episode now or later, the reason that we're going to create some trouble for you as a parent

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is specifically that the example is such a crucial example of how Christianity in sort of the modern

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form of Jesus died for us, and so everything's okay, is fundamentally destructive to how we are

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living our lives. So we're going to make the case for that. And that specific example is one,

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the whether or not your kids listen with you today, your kids need to know before they go and

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get married, they need to understand how certain sins should affect may selection, because they

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will affect the rest of their lives. They've affected your lives, they've affected everyone's

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lives in varying ways. So again, I'm going to give a brief recap of Scripture as it relates to God

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acting in time, and I'm going to cover just a few highlights of God doing stuff in time.

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The reason for highlighting these is that I think that as Christians today, even faithful

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Christians, we kind of look at God's action in creation as basically limited to what God said

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he did in Scripture, and then we have this hiatus, and then at some point he's going to come back.

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And so that's why I say we're kind of functionally deists, we'll make that case. But it's not that

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we're saying God never did anything after six days of creation, but we kind of believe that

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Jesus ascended into heaven, and then God's just kind of hands off, and later on God will come

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back and do more stuff. But in the meantime, we're kind of on our own. And that's false,

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that's plainly contradictory to Scripture. And again, it affects how we confess our faith,

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and how we live our lives. So in the beginning, the Word was with God, and the Word was God,

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and God said, Let there be light. And by the end of the sixth day of creation, God had finished

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all of the things that he intended to make, and he saw that it was very good.

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God walked with Adam face to face as friends, even as creature and creator, there was no

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adversarial nature there as there is today. Adam sinned. When he sinned, God cursed him,

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expelled him from the garden, declared that you will die. And God blessed him and said,

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through your lineage, I will solve this problem. I will undo the damage that you have done to all

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of creation in the fall. For about 1500 years, mankind became more and more wicked from the

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days of the garden, until in the days of Noah, that generation was so evil that God regretted

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he ever made man to begin with. And only for the sake of keeping the promise he had made to Adam,

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did he not kill all of mankind. So he preserved eight souls along with all the animals that needed

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to hitch a ride on the ark through the flood. Everything else in creation on this planet was

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destroyed. 500 years after that, God came to Abram and made Abram a new promise. 2000 years

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after God promised Adam that there would be something in the future through his lineage that

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would undo this damage, God specifically promised Abram that it would be through his descendants

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that that promise would be fulfilled. And for the next 2000 years, God worked directly in

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the lives of Abraham's ancestors to preserve those promises, those prophecies, and to preserve

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that lineage, to preserve the bloodline passed from Adam through Noah to Abraham and his sons

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in fulfillment of God's promise. 2000 years after the promise to Abraham, 4000 years after the promise

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to Adam, Jesus was born the Christ, the Messiah. He came in the flesh. He lived for 30 years as a

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normal man. 30th year of his life, he began his ministry. And for three years, he publicly taught,

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he performed miracles, he fulfilled the law of God, he fulfilled the perfect life that Adam

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failed to lead. And he also fulfilled through his ministry and his miracles every single promise,

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every single prophecy of the Messiah that was made in the Old Testament. On the cross, when Jesus

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died and he said it was finished, 4000 years after God said that creation was finished, Jesus said

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that his perfect redemption, perfect redeeming work of redemption was completed in his death on the

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cross. He rose three days later from the dead. For 40 days, he appeared and ministered to hundreds

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of people. He was witnessed widely as being alive after having been provably visibly dead,

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murdered, and dead in the ground for three days. After 40 days, he ascended into heaven. And that's

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kind of where a lot of the direct action of God disappears. Now, interestingly, the timing of this

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episode is that in the church calendar, in the Western calendar, ascension was last week. And

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this coming Sunday is the first Sunday of Pentecost. So in that 10 days between Christ's ascension

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and the Sunday, 50 days after Easter, when those tongues of fire come upon the disciples and the

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gathered people on the Sunday of Pentecost, that is a very visible miracle of God performing

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in the world. And subsequent to that, I think almost all the miracles that were performed

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specifically by the apostles and by believers in fulfillment, again, of those prophecies that

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had been made in the Old Testament, once the apostles had died, once they had spread knowledge

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of God, once they had revealed what had been taught to them during their three years of seminary,

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listening at Christ's feet every day, and the direct revelations that they were receiving from

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God, we don't have any warrant to believe that there's been subsequent direct revelation from

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God since the last apostles that has died. Most Christians consider that direct revelation from

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God of new things has ended. And unfortunately, I think that has caused us to believe that God

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vanished. You know, God stopped directly acting. And although he made subsequent promises in the

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New Testament as well as the Old to us, we don't believe them in quite the same fashion that it

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was believed leading up to that point. And so we're going to begin by talking about the advent of

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Deism, subsequent to Christ's death and resurrection and ascension, fast forward about another 1500

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years in our timeline. The Renaissance began and it led into the Enlightenment. And so today,

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2000 years after Christ's ascension, we haven't really seen much activity from God, not in the

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same way that it was seen in the past. And we ignore a lot of the things that God said about how he

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would be active in the world. And I think that that has caused tremendous problems for us in

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our lives as Christians, because by forgetting all the promises that God made about being specifically

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active in our lives, we forget his nature as our Creator and as our Redeemer, the God who promised

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all of those good things and sacrificed himself on the cross, also promised the small stuff,

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give us this day our daily bread. That is a prayer for God to remember his promise to us.

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And why I think many of us say grace before meals and try to be cognizant of the fact that

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food theoretically comes from God. I don't think we necessarily have the sort of immediate

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understanding that what you are eating is direct providence from the Almighty. That's something

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that in past generations, we did have because we didn't have grocery stores. You had food,

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in many cases, food you grew yourselves. If you had a crop failure, you could potentially face

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starvation. Today, we're insulated from crop failures. It doesn't matter how bad the weather is,

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how bad the crops are. You can always go to the store and find food. So post-enlightenment,

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post-industrial revolution, the world we live in today has pushed God out of the way and let us

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live in a world where we can believe that God's not really around. He's not doing much. We should

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obey him, but it's all just kind of theoretical that God's not doing stuff today. So we're going

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to begin specifically by talking about the advent of deism and the influence that it has had on

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the Christian faith. So as is becoming a theme with this podcast, we are going to mention the

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Enlightenment because really, deism entered Western civilization, Western society, and

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in time, the Christian Church in the West during the Enlightenment. And there are a number of

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individuals we could discuss when it comes to Enlightenment deism, but one of the main

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individuals would of course be David Hume. Now, before getting to Hume specifically,

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what deism is in this historical context is essentially a rejection of special revelation,

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not general revelation, but special revelation, a rejection of miracles,

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and a rejection of mystery. Because in essence, what deism wants to do is be able to explain the

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world purely via observation, empirical observation, and so subject the world to human reason, human

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logic. And so there was a removal, literally in some cases, of the miracles and the mystery

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from Christianity, from the Bible. For instance, Jefferson is one of the best examples of this.

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He literally took a razor and glue and cut out parts of the Bible and moved things around

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because he did not like the miracles. He did not like the parts that could not be reduced to human

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reason. And so there goes the mysteries as well, which would be the sacraments. Because of course,

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you're not going to explain communion or baptism without mystery, at least if you're

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being true to Scripture. To expand on what exactly I mean for those who aren't familiar with the

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terms by special revelation versus general revelation, essentially it's the distinction

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between the natural world being general revelation and Scripture being special revelation.

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And that is, Scripture in so far as the things revealed in Scripture are not revealed in the

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general revelation in creation. And so, for instance, deus will affirm that there is a God.

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One would hope that is obvious by the name deus coming from Latin deus God. But they will affirm

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that there is a higher being, there is a Creator God, there is a God who is in control.

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They deny that he acts in time in his creation. It's the watchmaker idea that God wound up the

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universe after creating the universe, obviously, and then let it go. And he stands back and he

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watches it. And so he is transcendent and not imminent. That is imminent with an A, not an I.

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But special revelation is what you have in Scripture.

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Special revelation is those things that are not revealed in the creation itself.

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And so, for instance, the core of the Christian faith, not revealed in the general revelation.

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Yes, you can discern there is a God. Yes, you can discern some things about God.

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But you cannot discern what God's disposition towards you is and how he wants you to interact

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with him. Yes, you can reasonably come to the conclusion that you should worship God and that

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is correct. Insofar as pagans came to that conclusion, they were right. But without Scripture,

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you cannot know about Christ. You cannot know about original sin, except insofar as you look

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around and see that things are not as they should be. But you don't know what to do with that.

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And so you need that special revelation to know that Christ died for you and that belief

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in Christ is how you have a right relationship with God. That is special revelation. You cannot

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get that from simply looking at nature. And just to throw in a verse here, just so that

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we're establishing that we're not just making this stuff up and we're not

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trying to sell some sort of weird pagan version of Christianity, the very beginning of Romans,

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Romans 1, God writes, For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness

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and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known

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about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes,

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namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the

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creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although

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they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in

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their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened. So when we talk about natural revelation,

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general revelation, revealing God, we're not saying you don't need Jesus and you don't need

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scripture. We're pointing to scripture to say what God said about himself. God says that the heavens

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testified his glory. We mentioned on numerous episodes, go read Job 38 and following. Read it

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devotionally every week. That is God delivering an extended soliloquy about how creation itself

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testifies to his glory to every man, not only to Christians, but to every man who has ever lived.

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So Romans 1, the very beginning of the most important books in all scripture,

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says exactly what we're saying here. And we have a lot of critics who just flat out lie about

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everything we say. We are not making this stuff up. It's not a good idea that we had. God literally

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says this. So when we are battling deism, we're battling in our own church for precisely this

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reason. There are men who believe that natural revelation doesn't say anything about God. Now

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they're flipping it. They're saying that scripture is the only way to know anything and nature tells

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you nothing. God says both. God says that scripture reveals himself and the nature reveals himself

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in different ways and for different purposes. But to neglect one for the sake of the other

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is evil, as Christians, we don't get to do that. And it's also just ridiculous when they try to

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argue that scripture alone reveals God's glory, because usually when God in scripture appeals

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to his own glory, he appeals to creation. So scripture itself is directing us to creation to

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see the glory of God. And of course you paraphrase there the beginning of Psalm 19. I'll read the

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first six verses because they're highly relevant here. The heavens declare the glory of God,

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and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech and night to night

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reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor are there words whose voice is not heard.

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Their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.

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In them he is set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber,

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and like a strongman runs its course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens,

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and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat.

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And of course that is speaking about creation, it's speaking about what God has done,

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what you can see when you look out the window. And so again, general revelation, creation,

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special revelation, Scripture, both are true, both reveal truths about God, and Christians can refer

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to both. But then to move on to David Hume as mentioned, he is one of the ones who created

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the modern conception, or really the modern framework of thought that turns into modern deism.

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Because in his essay, one of his more famous essays of miracles in one of his books,

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he basically argues that miracles are impossible. The problem is, if you actually look at the essay

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and assess the logic used in it, the entire thing is begging the question in the technical sense.

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When someone says begging the question in everyday speech, most likely he is wrong.

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Because begging the question is a technical term, it is a term of art. If something brings up a

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question, it is raising the question. If something begs the question, what it is doing is, in the

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question, in the inquiry itself, you are assuming the conclusion. And that is what Hume does. Because

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the basic outline of Hume's argument is that a miracle is something, this is how he defines

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miracles, a miracle is something that transgresses the natural law. It is something that is outside

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of a natural law that goes against it. And so the most common example that's going to be given is

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a man coming back from the dead, because of course the goal of denying miracles is to deny the

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resurrection, both Christ's resurrection and ultimately our resurrection. And so what he argues

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is miracles cannot exist because natural laws are established over time due to the empirical

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observation of many men. This is the argument that an empirical truth, if you have contending

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arguments, the one that is true is the one that has the greater weight of evidence behind it.

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Now there are a number of problems with this, some of you will undoubtedly be able to see them.

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For instance, if you have a long established error, how do you overturn that with accurate

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observations? Because every accurate observation is going to be, by Hume's own rule, thrown out

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because it doesn't accord with this supposedly established natural law. And so as you can see,

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he's begging the question. He's saying a miracle can't happen because a miracle is outside the

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natural law and only things that are inside the natural law can happen. And so it's just complete

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gibberish. That's literally the definition of a miracle. Exactly, that's the problem. He throws

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out the idea of a miracle by saying a miracle can't happen because a miracle is contrary to

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natural law. Natural law here being the laws of nature, not capital N, capital L, natural law

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flowing from God. But that's the core of this, and this is bled over into first the academy

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because of the sciences, particularly the hard sciences that then infected the liberal arts,

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and then from there, because of course theology is a liberal art. Theology used to be called the

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queen of the liberal arts in proper academia in centuries past. From there it bled over into the

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church. And so you have Christians who basically affirm this sort of thought pattern without

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really thinking about what it is they're affirming. And so you have a denial of God's

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active involvement in the world. You have this conception of God as being, as was mentioned

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earlier, transcendent and not imminent, which is to say above it all, sitting back watching,

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he's off in heaven somewhere. This is an error that some make when they contend that Christ

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is at the right hand of God. Not that Christ being at the right hand of God is an error,

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but the conception of what the right hand of God is can be an error. God is not a body.

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God is spirit. God is not contained in some heaven that is a physical location. The right hand of God

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is a position of power and authority. And so Christ isn't contained according to divinity or

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humanity in some physical location somewhere. He is omnipresent because of course the fullness

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of deity dwells bodily in Christ. Therefore he has the fullness of the attributes of deity,

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one of course being omnipresence, sort of a tangent, but it's important here,

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because if you deny that God is imminent by saying that he is only transcendent,

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then you are denying his involvement in the creation and really you're at least verging

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on denying the very nature of God because you're denying omnipresence. And so what we need to do

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is have more of the mindset that our ancestors, our forebears in the faith would have had where

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they looked at the natural world with wonder because they looked at it as God being actively

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involved. God is the one who causes the sun to rise and the sun to set. God is the one who causes

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the change of the seasons. God is the one who causes every seed to germinate in your field or not.

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Everything we have comes from God. He is involved in everything from the grandest scale,

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the movement of galaxies in the universe, the interaction of the galaxies, this grand awesome

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scale all the way down to the smallest interactions of whether it's individual atoms or particles

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inside of one. God controls all of that. He is involved. He upholds everything by his power.

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Without God's active, imminent involvement, nothing happens. And that includes miracles. Now,

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Hume's definition of what a miracle is isn't entirely wrong because when we speak of a miracle,

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what we really mean is that God involved himself in a particular way that is so out of the ordinary

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that it is utterly undeniable. So God is involved, as I said, in everything. So the cell divisions

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in your body right now, God controls those, those happen because he wills it. But we don't call

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that a miracle. It is a miracle in the broader sense of the term, but we don't call it a miracle

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because it is in perfect accord with the way God made things to operate. What we would call a miracle

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is a man coming back from the dead because that is not in accord with how the fallen world works.

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God has to intervene in a special sort of way to cause a man to come back from the dead.

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And so that's what we mean really when we say miracle. And that's what these individuals,

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born of the Enlightenment thought, deny. They rip them literally out of the Bible in some cases

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and say you can't possibly have a miracle because God isn't actually involved in creation. He is

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merely sitting back and watching the machine that he spun up and then let loose. And I think at some

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point what has really happened is that while they were trying to deny miracles outright,

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you know, special things like resurrection of the dead, as you laid out, they ultimately

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are fundamentally denying that God is doing the things that God says that he does in scripture.

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In Jeremiah 10, it's written, it is he who made the earth by his power, who established the world

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by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the heavens. When he utters his voice, there

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is a tumult of waters in the heaven, and he makes the mist rise from the ends of the earth.

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He makes lightning for the rain, and he brings forth the wind from its storehouses.

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And when from the storehouses, a phrase that's repeated several times throughout scripture.

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Now today, thanks to modern science, we know that sunlight heats the earth's crust, causes

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differences in temperature, which cause differences in pressure in the atmosphere,

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and so we get wind. We get winds, we get cyclones, we get all manner, you know, everything from the

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small sprees to the most powerful tornado is all caused more or less by the same things.

27:26.000 --> 27:32.160
And none of it's supernatural. On paper, you can model it and the models work. You can have a model

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of how a tornado or a hurricane or a breeze works that doesn't involve supernatural. There's no

27:38.880 --> 27:44.640
variable for God in those models, and yet they're very predictive. The problem that we have today

27:44.640 --> 27:51.600
as functional deists is that because post-enlightenment, we have these new understandings of the facts

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on the ground. Oh, well, okay, that's how wind works. That's neat. And you know, maybe you're

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really into it and you become a meteorologist. That's fine. But if you then go on to deny

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Jeremiah 10 and the other passages that says that God brings forth the wind from his storehouses,

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you can't be Christian. And see, that's the reason that this is a subject that's worth tackling,

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is that if you're denying these trivial parts of Scripture, and I say that tongue-in-cheek,

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there's no such thing. That's the point. If you know how wind works and you decide, well,

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I know how that works at the atomic level, so it can't have anything to do with God,

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when God says, I did that, the disconnect is that the fact that we have no introspective

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through reason, how things work, doesn't tell us the ultimate cause of it working. And God

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Himself says that. He's doing all of it. One of the points that I've made elsewhere is that

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I think there's something very important to be discerned from revelation as John is being given

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his revelation in heaven, in his vision. When he first comes to the throne of God,

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and the terrifying beasts are there, they say two things. The very first thing that they say to him

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is, holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty who was and is and is to come.

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So right there, they're confessing the Trinity with the triple holy. And the next thing that they

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say to him as he stands before the throne, listen to this, worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive

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glory and honor and power, for you created all things and by your will they existed and were

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created. Now the reason I think that's so important is that the very first two things that are said

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in heaven before the throne of God have nothing to do with Christ's sacrifice on the cross.

29:48.080 --> 29:51.760
I do not say that to diminish that in the slightest. That is the third thing,

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but it's important I think that in order, it says then worthy are you to take the scroll

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and to open its seals, for you were slain and by your blood you ran some people for God

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from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and

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priest to our God and they shall reign on the earth. So the 24 gathered around the throne

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do confess Christ as the Redeemer. That's absolutely a fundamental part of Christianity.

30:18.560 --> 30:23.120
There are two other things that are said before the throne of God first. The first is the Trinity

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and the second is declaring the glory of God in creation. And so again, as we introspect the glory

30:29.840 --> 30:38.320
of God in creation, as Christians that should give us a greater appreciation for the glory of God.

30:38.320 --> 30:44.160
It shouldn't make us appreciate science, which again is just, it's a word for knowledge. That's

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literally what it means. Scantia is knowledge. It's not special. It's not a different religion.

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It is a knowledge can only be of a true thing. So when we have scientific knowledge, which is

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redundant, of things, what we're saying is, okay, we understand better how it's working.

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And to Corey's point about Hume and his definition of what we can accept, that's the problem that

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science faces today. The established science, like made up things like anthropocentric, global warming,

31:15.360 --> 31:21.440
are complete nonsense. But because 95 doctors out of 100 say, this is how it works, no one is

31:21.440 --> 31:29.520
allowed to even get funding to say, well, that's complete nonsense. So these false beliefs have

31:29.520 --> 31:36.000
effects on our lives in the left-hand kingdom and in the right. As we get further and further away

31:36.000 --> 31:41.680
from believing that God is active in creation, it's easier to forget the other things. One of

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our recurring themes is that Satan doesn't care which lie you buy. As Christians and most of you

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listening are Protestants, you're not going to fall for the trick that you can save yourself,

31:52.960 --> 31:58.080
that you can do something to earn your salvation. We got that one nailed. We figured it out 500

31:58.080 --> 32:03.200
years ago and we've stuck to our guns. Satan didn't rest on his laurels. He's found other avenues of

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attack that are not frontal assaults on the second article of the creed. He's going after the other

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stuff that we don't have good arguments against. It's part of the reason that Stonequire exists.

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We're talking about this stuff that no one's really talked much about because Satan wasn't

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attacking it before. Now that Satan is attacking it, it should become one of the chief concerns of

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the church, capital C. Every Christian denomination is either struggling with some of these questions,

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things like traniism and other matters related to the flesh and how we're created,

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or they're adopting wholesale the religion of the world and they're ceasing to be Christian,

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even as they still have the creeds and confessions, whatever your confession is,

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near denomination. When you start whittling away at what God has done in his creation,

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that is an over-denial of the Creator. You can't get around that. If you say,

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no God, the wind didn't come from you, the wind came from solar radiation,

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God will judge you for that is a false confession that you were denying him.

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And if you deny God, he will deny you on the last day.

33:11.840 --> 33:18.480
I think it may be helpful for the listeners to go over, I guess really just a couple practical

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matters when it comes to deism in our own daily lives in the modern world.

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And it should be mentioned first, the first point, the Freemasons Ardeus.

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That is one of the reasons, of a number of very strong reasons,

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that Christians cannot be masons. And I know that some will think, well, my grandfather was a

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Christian and a Mason and maybe that was so. But if he was a Christian, it was because he was

33:55.280 --> 34:03.520
a bad Mason. And if he was a good Mason, he was not a Christian. Because again, Freemasonry

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is deist. It denies that God is active in his creation, that he is involved,

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and it denies the mysteries. It is exactly what we've been describing thus far.

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It is an organized form of deism. It is a deistic competing religion to Christianity.

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And so again, no, you cannot be a Mason and a Christian. These are incompatible. And historically,

34:30.720 --> 34:38.080
Lutheran churches, among others, have barred membership to Freemasons. And certain other groups

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have actually persecuted the masons historically, which is of course what a Christian ruler would do,

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because they're an anti-Christian cult. But then another point that I want to make

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is something that many have undoubtedly read at some point. And that is

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C.S. Lewis' Trilemma. I'm not going to recommend C.S. Lewis generally as a theologian. He is a

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decent apologist. But apologist and theologian usually not found together in one man. Usually a

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man who is a good theologian is a bad apologist, and a good apologist is usually not a very good

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theologian. Lewis should have let others do the theology, but his trilemma is actually

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quite sound. It is quite good. I'm not going to say that it is purely

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logically sound, as in you could turn it into a modal logic problem and arrive at the conclusion.

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That's not the point. It is compelling, which is why I am calling it sound. And the trilemma,

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of course, is when you deal with what Christ taught and what Christ claimed,

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you are left with three options for what Christ is. And that is lunatic, liar, or lord.

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You can say that he was a lunatic, that he was a crazy man who lived in the desert

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and told people some good stuff and claimed some crazy things like he was God.

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Or you can claim he was a liar, that he was just a swindler, that he was

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one of a long line, actually, in Palestine of those claiming to be a messiah.

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Or you can conclude that he is your lord. Because if you take his claim seriously,

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that's the only option. If the things that Christ did and the things that Christ claimed

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are both true, then he is your lord and savior.

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Deists don't want to deal with this. That's why you have men like Jefferson who want to say,

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I really like what Christ taught, and then cut out all this other stuff.

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Why is what Christ taught compelling absent his other claims? And why can we just jettison those

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claims? They don't have an answer for this from the deist perspective. It's the same sort of

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argument as those who would say, we agree with this confession insofar as we like what it says,

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which for Lutherans, of course, I'm speaking of quatness subscription to the book of Concord,

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which is an argument that the book of Concord, insofar as it is correct, correct, of course,

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being here from the position, the viewpoint of the one making the argument, insofar as it is

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correct, or in agreement with our interpretation of Scripture. That's completely meaningless.

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To say that you subscribe to something insofar as it is correct, in your opinion,

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means nothing. Insofar as the menu at my local Thai restaurant is correct. Yeah, of course,

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I subscribed to that. Because insofar as it's correct, it's true. That's the case for all

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documents. It's a totally meaningless claim. And that's the problem that we have here with deism.

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Their claims about Christ make him irrelevant, meaningless, and really highlight the bankruptcy

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of deism itself. I think one of the worst consequences of the industrial revolution

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was that it separated us from our food. It separated us from our food sources, from how

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God provides things to us. And there's so much of how God wanted the world to be ordered,

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that hinges on Providence, the hinges on him acting directly to us. Now, I'm not making a case for

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everyone returning to doing everything himself. I would be dead if that were the case. I can't

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grow anything. It's not fundamentally a rejection of specialization of labor, but I think it's

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important for us to acknowledge that in the industrial age, we have been separated from

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the immediacy of God's delivery of these things to us. As I said earlier, I mentioned before,

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a grocery store is a miracle. You can go in there any time of the year, any season, and basically

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get food pretty much from around the world. If you have a decent grocery store, it's going to be

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in good shape. It's going to be fresh. Some of the stuff is genetically engineered now,

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so it's been messed with, so it looks good. But even with that, the fact that there's always food

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when you're hungry, if you can afford it, is itself a miracle. And I think because we have

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gotten away from the lifestyle that involved hand-to-mouth in the sense that you are growing

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the food or the animal, the plants, whatever it is, whatever sort of gardening or farming you're

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doing on any scale, when that's no longer a part of our lives, we forget that someone's doing that

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on our behalf. And that specialization means that the farmer that witnesses birth and death,

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that witnesses the sacrifice of the animals as they're dying to be our food. The farmer sees

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that and it's kept out of sight. And frankly, one of the other whores of the industrial age is

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industrial farming, which is absolutely evil and should be destroyed and made illegal everywhere.

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That is vile what is done to creatures today. It makes me sick. If you can support local farmers

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just as an aside, please do that because a local farmer is always going to be taking better care

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of their animals. I have a friend a few years ago who grew some pigs. They had one bad day in their

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life and they didn't even know it. They were outside. They were eating like crazy. He cleared

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several acres with the pigs eating everything up and then they made incredibly good bacon and ham.

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And they never knew it was coming. They had a wonderful life as pigs and then we enjoyed them

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for a year as dinner. That is the way God has ordered things since Noah got off the ark.

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God said, as I gave you the plants, I now give you all the animals too. Everything is yours to eat.

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Now that we have grocery stores, now that we have all these other sources of things,

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we forget that God is still doing that for us. It's really the polar opposite of

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manna from heaven, where they were wandering in the desert and they had no food. And then it just

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rained this bread for them. And that was their sustenance. The immediacy of that

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is the same sort of immediacy we get from a grocery store, but without any of the notion

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that it's a miracle that God's doing it. I want to read again Matthew 6, just this passage,

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where Jesus is specifically preaching against us believing the watchmaker theory in any regard.

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He talks about the smallest things in this passage as an illustration that if you can trust

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God for the small things, you can certainly trust him for the big ones. Therefore, I tell you,

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do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink or about your body or

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what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds

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of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.

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Are you not of more value than they? In which of you, by being anxious, can add a single hour to

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his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field,

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how they grow. They neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you even Solomon in all his glory was not

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arrayed like one of these. But if God so closed the grass of the field, which today is alive and

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tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

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Therefore do not be anxious saying, what shall we eat or what shall we drink or what shall we wear?

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For the Gentiles seek after these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.

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But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added

42:48.000 --> 42:53.760
to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself.

42:53.760 --> 42:59.120
Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. This is a passage I've read at least once

42:59.120 --> 43:04.240
before in a previous episode that the reason I keep returning to it is, one, it countermans

43:04.240 --> 43:11.040
deism flatly. It's saying that your food, your clothing, all that comes to God not only is some

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sort of miraculous intervention outside of the laws of nature, but it's how God provides things.

43:18.000 --> 43:23.040
God gives you a job, God gives you a house, God gives you food. All the things that God gives you

43:23.040 --> 43:29.040
are his blessings, and they're every much as bit of blessing as the miraculous manna from heaven.

43:29.040 --> 43:34.320
God is simply fulfilling this promise to all his creatures in a different way in our lives,

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and that's a blessing too. I'm not complaining about grocery stores. I'm saying that the fact

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that we have this blessing of such great abundance should be a reason for even greater

43:44.320 --> 43:50.720
thanksgiving and not certainly a reason for us to forget that it's God that's producing all of it.

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He sends the rain, he sends the winds, he grows the crops, he gives us farmers and grocery stores

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and truck drivers, and all the things that are so mundane that without which we would starve.

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All of that is God acting in our lives, and the fact that there's scientific reasoning and

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understanding that let us think, oh, I understand how the economy works. I understand how the

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weather works. I understand how crop rotation and germination works. If you forget God,

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you've missed the entire point of everything. You'd be better off starving to death and remembering

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God than being fed and forgetting him. God is giving us both in nature and in scripture,

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and all we have to do is receive it with thanksgiving.

44:34.240 --> 44:40.880
I think a final point that we should make in the U.S. context, which of course is our primary

44:40.880 --> 44:47.440
context. Yes, we have listeners from all over the world, in fact, but in the U.S. context,

44:48.160 --> 44:53.840
many operate under the assumption that the U.S. doesn't have an established religion,

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an official religion, and that we cannot have that. Of course, that's a different argument

44:59.280 --> 45:04.720
from another time, perhaps. No, the Constitution doesn't actually bar an established religion,

45:04.720 --> 45:11.760
it bars Congress from doing it. But the U.S. does have an official religion,

45:12.880 --> 45:18.800
and it is deism. It is called ceremonial deism. Now, some, of course, will try to argue that

45:18.800 --> 45:25.200
it's not actually a religion, but it is, in fact, a religion. It was first mentioned in

45:25.200 --> 45:33.280
Lynch v. Donnelly, in a dissenting opinion, but I will read just a quick paragraph from that

45:33.280 --> 45:39.760
dissenting opinion. I would suggest that such practices as the designation of in God we trust,

45:39.760 --> 45:44.720
as our national motto, or the references to God contained in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag,

45:45.280 --> 45:52.080
can best be understood in Dean Rostow's apt phrase, as a form of a ceremonial deism,

45:52.080 --> 45:57.120
protected from establishment clause scrutiny, chiefly because they have lost, through rote

45:57.120 --> 46:07.520
repetition, any significant religious content. And so, essentially, our state religion is an

46:07.520 --> 46:12.320
anti-religion. It is a rejection of Christianity, because, of course, that is ultimately what deism

46:12.320 --> 46:21.200
is, a rejection of Christianity, and this comes from the Jewish law school professor Eugene Rostow.

46:21.200 --> 46:26.960
I think at the time he was actually the dean of the law school. But his argument is that the U.S.

46:26.960 --> 46:34.880
has a ceremonial deism as its religion, which makes appeals to God or a higher authority that

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aren't actually truly religious in that they aren't really an appeal to God, but an appeal to a sort

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of tradition or belief in a higher principle, which, of course, is deism. And that is an important

46:53.120 --> 47:01.760
point about deism. It's this appeal to a higher power, which we, of course, see in Alcoholics

47:01.760 --> 47:08.160
Anonymous, or an appeal to Providence. Any number of different terms are used for this.

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If you see someone who uses only those terms, you should be deeply suspicious. That person is most

47:15.600 --> 47:23.600
likely a deist, not a Christian. Now, there is a bit of complexity or potential confusion here,

47:23.600 --> 47:29.120
because Christians can also use those terms. It is perfectly permissible for a Christian to refer

47:30.080 --> 47:41.360
to God as uppercase P Providence or as the higher power. However, a Christian will necessarily

47:41.360 --> 47:47.440
also refer explicitly to Christ as Lord and Savior at some point. A Christian will be able

47:47.440 --> 47:53.040
to give that confession of the faith. That's the dividing line. The deist will never give that

47:53.040 --> 47:59.120
confession of Christ. The Christian will give the confession of Christ even if he also uses

47:59.120 --> 48:06.160
these terms that overlap with terms used by deists. And so it is important, it is incumbent on Christians

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to pay close attention, particularly to those who are speaking in the public sphere,

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when they use these terms, and perhaps even more importantly, which terms they neglect to use.

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And so we the living in this generation, separated 2,000 years from Christ's ascension,

48:25.200 --> 48:32.880
have inherited this post-enlightenment version of Christianity that most of us hold lazily.

48:33.680 --> 48:39.760
It's simultaneously a true confession and a false confession, because if you stop believing that

48:39.760 --> 48:46.320
God is doing certain things, even while you believe he's God, we're not sitting here pronouncing

48:46.320 --> 48:51.760
judgment on who has true faith and who doesn't. God alone knows that. But we can say with absolute

48:51.760 --> 48:57.440
certainty that you are endangering your salvation by endangering your faith, by adopting a false

48:57.440 --> 49:04.560
confession that denies God's things that he reveals in scripture that he does. And one of the reasons

49:04.560 --> 49:08.400
that we want to do this episode, and one of the reasons that we began by specifically talking about

49:09.360 --> 49:16.160
the idea of a watchmaker God who's basically checked out now, is that as we've gotten into

49:16.160 --> 49:22.800
a gospel reductionistic version of Christianity within the church, where when we are professing

49:22.800 --> 49:27.760
our faith, we don't want to talk about God punishing sins anymore. We don't want to,

49:27.760 --> 49:34.400
we even want to say the word sin. We talk about brokenness. We talk about things being problematic,

49:34.400 --> 49:40.160
which is a Marxist term. We don't say sin. We don't say evil. That's one of the reasons that

49:40.160 --> 49:46.880
Cory and I say sin and evil a lot. It's not being obsessive or trying to be controversial. It's that

49:46.880 --> 49:51.840
that's what these things are. That's what God calls them. So when God calls something evil,

49:51.840 --> 49:57.200
and you call it problematic, there's a disconnect. And if you claim to be Christian and you won't

49:57.200 --> 50:02.880
say things the way God said them, you're going to get into trouble, even while you're confessing

50:02.880 --> 50:09.200
all the other parts of the faith that are true. And one of the chief problems that we have today

50:09.920 --> 50:17.360
is that Christians don't believe that God punishes sin in this life. We believe that you sin and

50:17.360 --> 50:22.000
sin and sin, or you try not to sin, and maybe you do a decent job. Obviously, no matter what,

50:22.000 --> 50:28.000
you're going to sin some. That's part of the Christian confession. We cannot live a perfect

50:28.000 --> 50:34.480
life. Jesus 2,000 years ago lived the only perfect human life. We will only be perfected in the

50:34.480 --> 50:40.720
resurrection, covered in his blood. Until that day, no matter how hard we try, we will fail.

50:40.720 --> 50:48.480
Nevertheless, we are to try to obey God in confession that he is our God. He is our creator.

50:48.480 --> 50:55.360
We are to confess as the angels before the throne, Holy, Holy, Holy, you are God Almighty.

50:55.440 --> 50:59.520
I will do what you say. That should be simple and obvious to everyone.

51:00.640 --> 51:06.160
Instead, what we hear from so many of our teachers is, oh, don't worry about that sin stuff. Jesus

51:06.160 --> 51:13.360
has it covered. Just try to do better and you're forgiven. And by no means would Coriore I diminish

51:13.360 --> 51:20.400
forgiveness in the slightest. The entire Christian faith is predicated upon the creator of the universe

51:20.400 --> 51:27.680
6,000 years ago coming 2,000 years ago to repair the damage that Adam did and that we perpetuate

51:27.680 --> 51:33.040
through our sinful lives and our sinful being. The fact that God paid the eternal price for our

51:33.040 --> 51:39.120
sins on the cross does not obviate the fact that there are temporal punishments for those sins.

51:40.320 --> 51:45.760
Not always, not automatic. It's not a one-to-one correlation. Nevertheless,

51:46.400 --> 51:51.440
it is absolutely the case that God will punish us in this life for the things that we do.

51:52.720 --> 51:59.040
I want to read now the general confession that's given publicly in virtually all Lutheran churches

51:59.680 --> 52:06.240
for hundreds of years. Oh, Almighty God, merciful Father, I, poor, miserable sinner, confess unto

52:06.240 --> 52:12.080
you all my sins and iniquities with which I have ever offended you and justly deserved your temporal

52:12.160 --> 52:17.520
and eternal punishment. But I am hardly sorry for them and sincerely repent of them. And I pray

52:17.520 --> 52:22.400
you of your boundless mercy and for the sake of the holy, innocent, bitter sufferings and death

52:22.400 --> 52:27.680
of your beloved Son, Jesus Christ, to be gracious and merciful to me, a poor sinful being.

52:28.800 --> 52:34.400
Now, every week Lutherans are saying, justly deserved your temporal and eternal punishment.

52:35.120 --> 52:40.720
And we focus a lot on the eternal punishment. That's hell. That's taken care of as a Christian

52:40.720 --> 52:45.520
with this confession, with a true confession of God. You are off the hook for the eternal

52:45.520 --> 52:51.440
punishment. We never think about the temporal punishment. As I said at the beginning, if any of

52:51.440 --> 52:56.320
you happen to be familiar with Roman Catholic doctrine, we're not remotely talking about the

52:56.320 --> 53:04.320
same thing. Temporal and eternal are two different spheres. One is bounded in eternity. The other

53:04.320 --> 53:11.360
is bounded in time. Temporal is not a synonym for temporary. And the reason I mention Roman

53:11.360 --> 53:16.800
Catholicism in particular is that this is how indulgences came about. They realized that if

53:16.800 --> 53:25.840
they could attribute some additional penance to pay in time for sins, they could raise money.

53:25.840 --> 53:32.000
It was one of the reasons politically that the Reformation was fought was that the St. Peter's

53:32.000 --> 53:37.840
Basilica, all the beautiful things in Italy, those were being built with indulgenced money

53:37.840 --> 53:45.840
extracted largely from Germans. It was a racial national extortion racket in the name of Rome,

53:45.840 --> 53:51.920
in the name of the Pope, to get money from one nation and give it to others. Now, the indulgences

53:51.920 --> 53:57.840
were everywhere, but they're pushed particularly hard in Germany. And so when Roman Catholics talk

53:57.840 --> 54:03.600
about temporal punishments, they specifically mean doing something to get off the hook in this

54:03.600 --> 54:08.240
life. That's not what we mean. That's not what the Lutherans are talking about. We talk about

54:08.240 --> 54:14.800
temporal punishment. Lutherans are talking about what Nathan brought to David in 2 Samuel 12.

54:15.760 --> 54:20.640
Nathan said, You have struck down your eye the Hittite with a sword and have taken his wife

54:20.640 --> 54:25.440
to be your wife, and you have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now therefore, the sword

54:25.440 --> 54:30.000
shall never depart from your house, because you have despised me and have taken the wife of your

54:30.000 --> 54:35.520
eye the Hittite to be your wife. Thus says the Lord, Behold, I will raise up evil against you

54:35.520 --> 54:40.560
out of your own house, and I will take your wives before your eyes and give them to your neighbor,

54:40.560 --> 54:46.000
and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this sun. For you did it secretly, but I will do

54:46.000 --> 54:51.920
this thing before all Israel and before all the sun. David said to Nathan, I have sinned against the

54:51.920 --> 54:57.840
Lord, and Nathan said to David, The Lord also has put away your sin. You shall not die. Nevertheless,

54:57.840 --> 55:04.160
because of this deed, you have utterly scorned the Lord. The child who is born to you shall die.

55:05.040 --> 55:12.160
So that's a temporal punishment. Now that is a specific, you might say, miraculous temporal

55:12.160 --> 55:18.640
punishment. But the fact remains, Nathan said, The Lord has put away your sin, meaning the eternal

55:18.640 --> 55:26.400
punishment. Nevertheless, David's son was killed by God. That was the temporal consequence. Notably,

55:26.400 --> 55:31.120
in light of some of our previous episodes, the temporal consequence for David's sin

55:31.120 --> 55:38.240
was visited upon his son, who, by our standards, had done nothing, but he was the product

55:38.240 --> 55:46.160
of an edible union, and God cursed it with death. So when we talk about temporal consequences for

55:46.160 --> 55:50.880
sin, as we've talked about in the past, we're dedicating this episode specifically to the point,

55:52.560 --> 56:00.960
God will sometimes use punishment in this life, in your life as you are living and breathing,

56:00.960 --> 56:06.960
punishment for sin that you have committed by way of chastisement and reproach, and to bring you to

56:06.960 --> 56:13.120
repentance. In the case of David and Nathan, he had already confessed his sin when he was confronted

56:13.120 --> 56:21.040
by Nathan, and yet still the punishment was visited upon him, even as God forgave the eternal price

56:21.040 --> 56:27.680
for that sin. So it is absolutely Christian doctrine that something that you do in this life

56:28.240 --> 56:34.720
will have punishment from God in this life. That's how this ties in with deism. If you believe in

56:34.720 --> 56:40.400
the deistic God, Jesus sent into heaven, and he's going to show up on the last day, but in between,

56:40.400 --> 56:47.200
God's not really going to do anything. Oh, maybe he feeds us, but the idea that God would cause in

56:47.200 --> 56:53.440
your life specific punishment for specific sin is a big deal, and it's something that has a direct

56:53.440 --> 57:00.880
impact on our lives, on every man's life. So when we're talking about obeying God, or not obeying

57:00.880 --> 57:09.120
God, and we're talking about Christian doctrine focusing, we would argue too much on forgiveness,

57:09.200 --> 57:13.760
I know that sounds terrible, but we're trying to make the point that if all of your focus is on

57:13.760 --> 57:19.200
forgiveness, that's the eternal forgiveness, the specific point we're making here is that

57:19.200 --> 57:25.120
God does not forgive the temporal punishments for your sins. You will still face some consequence.

57:25.120 --> 57:30.400
Again, not a one-to-one relationship. Not every sin has a direct and immediate punishment.

57:30.400 --> 57:34.960
God doesn't promise that. He does, however, promise that there will be temporal punishments for sins,

57:34.960 --> 57:38.720
and so when they are visited, Christians are to point to them and say,

57:38.720 --> 57:45.920
this is God's punishment for this sin. Sometimes as a demonstration that the thing itself is sin,

57:45.920 --> 57:51.440
when you see the punishment for the thing, that is a demonstration of the evil of it. It's a proof

57:51.440 --> 57:58.320
that it is sin, and when antinomians want to focus on, well, Jesus died for you, God forgave

57:58.320 --> 58:03.360
all that, don't worry about it, that's fundamentally destructive to the faith, because it allows you

58:03.360 --> 58:08.160
to keep on sinning and sinning and knowing that Jesus paid for it all on the cross, so you can

58:08.160 --> 58:12.880
just kind of do whatever you want and try not to sin so much. Well, when someone says you're

58:12.880 --> 58:17.280
actually destroying your body and your mind and your soul all at the same time by your evil,

58:18.080 --> 58:22.720
that's part of what Christians need to be able to tell each other. You should be able to tell

58:22.720 --> 58:28.400
your friend who is sinning, you're abusing drugs, look what is doing to your body, look what is

58:28.400 --> 58:34.720
doing to your family, you're being punished for your evil, stop being evil, and those punishments,

58:34.720 --> 58:40.960
some of them will go away. The consequences for the punishments may linger, but they're a consequence

58:40.960 --> 58:46.640
of sin in time. That's a part of the Christian faith, and it's one that we have to remember,

58:46.640 --> 58:52.560
because as the world gets worse and worse, I don't think we can just cling more and more to the cross

58:52.560 --> 58:58.480
and think about forgiveness and eternity while ignoring the destruction that we're inflicting

58:58.480 --> 59:05.600
on creation. Destroying creation is sin. Destroying your body is sin. We can't do that. When you

59:05.600 --> 59:12.720
continue to sin unrepentantly, you're jeopardizing your salvation. So this is a matter of profound

59:12.720 --> 59:17.920
urgency and importance. It's the whole reason that we're setting this up in terms of deism and

59:17.920 --> 59:24.080
temporal consequences, because rejection of a God who's active in the world fundamentally

59:24.080 --> 59:29.280
results in rejection of a God who will ever punish you for anything you do. Christians think that they

59:29.280 --> 59:34.240
can just live a consequence-free life by doing anything, and then as soon as they confess,

59:34.240 --> 59:40.880
okay, it's over, you can't, you know, not touch and can't get mad, you're forgiven in eternity,

59:40.880 --> 59:43.360
you may still have to face consequences in this life.

59:44.320 --> 59:48.960
And so this is where we'll get into the section about which we warned you at the beginning of

59:48.960 --> 59:55.120
the podcast, where we will be covering some topics that you may not want your children to hear just

59:55.120 --> 01:00:03.760
yet. We're not going to cover this in particular depth because it gets very technical very quickly.

01:00:04.560 --> 01:00:10.240
Some of you may have noticed as an aside here that we didn't touch really on theistic evolution

01:00:10.320 --> 01:00:15.760
in this episode. We didn't do that because that is also a subject that gets very complex very

01:00:15.760 --> 01:00:22.560
quickly, both philosophically and biologically. We will probably eventually do a future episode

01:00:22.560 --> 01:00:28.960
on that. It will be a deep dive episode. It will be involved and complicated. You may want to listen

01:00:28.960 --> 01:00:35.120
to it a few times, but that is not this episode today. However, we are going to touch on some

01:00:35.120 --> 01:00:43.840
biology here because this ties into the temporal consequences of certain kinds of sin, particularly

01:00:43.840 --> 01:00:53.040
in this case, sexual sins. And so first off, it is necessary to mention just some basics about

01:00:53.040 --> 01:01:00.720
human reproduction for those who perhaps skipped health class biology, what have you, humans are

01:01:00.800 --> 01:01:08.720
oagamas. Essentially means that we have two different kinds of gametes that come together

01:01:08.720 --> 01:01:13.840
to produce offspring. That's all that means. And it's anisogamous, which is that they are

01:01:13.840 --> 01:01:19.680
different from one another, which is just to say that the sperm cell and the egg cell are different.

01:01:21.120 --> 01:01:28.400
Because of course, the sperm cell is motile and the ovum is not. Now, the reason I mention this

01:01:28.400 --> 01:01:32.720
is because the fact that the sperm cell is motile is what is important here.

01:01:34.400 --> 01:01:42.560
Because for a woman, when she has sex with a man, if he ejaculates inside her, those cells,

01:01:42.560 --> 01:01:50.480
the DNA contained in them, do not stay put. Because again, sperm are motile, they can move,

01:01:50.480 --> 01:01:58.160
and they do so. And so the ultimate consequence of this is that the woman winds up having some

01:01:58.160 --> 01:02:05.680
of the DNA from the man with whom she had sex in various places in her body, including in her brain

01:02:05.680 --> 01:02:12.640
and her cerebral spinal fluid. They've conducted autopsies on deceased, obviously, women,

01:02:13.280 --> 01:02:22.320
and found male DNA in the female brain. Now, this happens a number of different ways. One

01:02:22.960 --> 01:02:30.080
is having sex. If the man ejaculates inside the woman, well, you now have male DNA inside

01:02:30.080 --> 01:02:35.360
the woman, and it makes its way to various other places inside her body. The other, of course,

01:02:35.360 --> 01:02:43.520
would be pregnancy. Because if the woman becomes pregnant with a son, well, the son has male DNA,

01:02:43.520 --> 01:02:50.800
obviously, and there is an exchange of cells between the child and the mother. Some of those do

01:02:50.800 --> 01:02:57.440
cross the placental barrier. And so you will wind up with immune cells and others from the

01:02:57.440 --> 01:03:02.720
mother in the child and from the child in the mother. Now, there are some benefits to this.

01:03:04.400 --> 01:03:10.480
There have been cases where those cells that cross the barrier from the child to the mother

01:03:10.480 --> 01:03:16.320
have actually repaired damage to the mother's body and potentially saved her life. It's very

01:03:16.320 --> 01:03:21.200
obvious why God designed the system the way he did. There are some stresses on the female body

01:03:21.200 --> 01:03:27.760
during pregnancy. The pregnancy itself takes care of some of those stresses and potentially have

01:03:27.760 --> 01:03:32.800
other damage that existed before the pregnancy in order to help bring the pregnancy to term.

01:03:33.680 --> 01:03:41.200
One example that I read many years ago was a woman who had a defective heart valve.

01:03:41.760 --> 01:03:47.360
She got pregnant and the fetal cells actually fixed the heart valve,

01:03:48.720 --> 01:03:54.720
which obviously vastly increases the odds of the pregnancy coming to term. Because, of course,

01:03:54.720 --> 01:03:58.400
there will be stresses on the heart throughout the pregnancy and particularly during the birth.

01:03:59.680 --> 01:04:03.520
And so this mother survived, whereas she probably would not otherwise have survived

01:04:04.320 --> 01:04:08.720
because of that microchimerism, which is what we're talking about here.

01:04:09.280 --> 01:04:14.880
Microchimerism is when you have a population of cells, you actually have multiple populations

01:04:14.880 --> 01:04:21.200
of cells if you're talking about the distinct genetic lineages, but you have a grouping of cells

01:04:21.760 --> 01:04:29.120
where the overwhelming majority of them are from one line. In this case, the mother. They are primarily

01:04:29.120 --> 01:04:37.040
her cells, but you have a significant, although small, percentage of those cells

01:04:37.040 --> 01:04:40.720
that are from another line, usually defined as less than one percent.

01:04:41.680 --> 01:04:45.840
That may not sound like a lot to most people because it's, you know, less than one percent,

01:04:45.840 --> 01:04:52.160
one percent is small. But if one percent of your cells are foreign, that's huge. And no,

01:04:52.160 --> 01:04:56.560
I'm not talking about the ones in your gut. Those don't count. These are cells that are actually

01:04:56.560 --> 01:05:03.440
in your body, potentially doing things because some of these are going to be stem cells.

01:05:03.440 --> 01:05:09.440
And stem cells are going to produce other cells. Some of them are going to be hematopoietic,

01:05:09.440 --> 01:05:14.480
which is to say producing the components that make blood. Some of them are going to do other things.

01:05:15.360 --> 01:05:18.960
As I mentioned, the ones that, for instance, could repair a heart valve do something like that.

01:05:19.680 --> 01:05:26.480
And so for a woman, you have this microchimerism as a result of having sex with a man or being

01:05:26.480 --> 01:05:32.400
pregnant. And that can include if she has a spontaneous abortion, which is to say a miscarriage,

01:05:32.400 --> 01:05:40.640
or an actual abortion, because that also still leaves behind those cells. Now, the point of this

01:05:41.200 --> 01:05:48.240
and how it ties into what we're discussing with regard to sin and the temporal consequences of

01:05:48.240 --> 01:05:55.200
sin is that if a woman has sex with many different men, she is going to have DNA, not necessarily

01:05:55.200 --> 01:06:01.600
from every single man with whom she had sex. But from a number of them, the consequences of this

01:06:02.400 --> 01:06:10.000
are going to be biological and psychological. We'll start with the biology. Biologically,

01:06:10.000 --> 01:06:17.360
you are going to have expression of certain proteins, various other things. I said we won't

01:06:17.360 --> 01:06:23.600
delve too deeply into it, so we won't do that. But you're going to have various consequences

01:06:23.600 --> 01:06:30.480
for the woman herself. And additionally, for any children she has, from that point forward,

01:06:31.200 --> 01:06:38.160
from her having sex with a number of different men, you are going to actually change the ultimate

01:06:38.160 --> 01:06:46.640
genetic makeup of the child due to the mother's past actions, which means for a man, of course,

01:06:48.240 --> 01:06:54.160
if your wife is a virgin and she has sex with you and only you, your children are going to be

01:06:54.160 --> 01:07:00.000
maximally related to you. In fact, each additional child you have with that same woman is going to

01:07:00.000 --> 01:07:06.720
be more related to you because you are literally injecting your DNA into her every time you have

01:07:06.720 --> 01:07:13.760
sex with her, not just when she gets pregnant. And so she becomes not necessarily more like you

01:07:13.760 --> 01:07:22.480
over time, but more genetically yours. That is how God designed it. God was not speaking idly or

01:07:22.480 --> 01:07:29.200
even truly figuratively when he said that man and wife become one flesh. It is more literal than

01:07:29.200 --> 01:07:36.160
most people would happen to think and certainly more literal than those living a profligate

01:07:36.160 --> 01:07:41.440
libertine lifestyle in our modern world would like to think. And so biologically,

01:07:42.240 --> 01:07:50.960
your children are going to be less related to you as the man if your wife has had sex with

01:07:50.960 --> 01:07:57.280
a number of other men. And that just continues to get worse as she has more and more partners.

01:07:57.840 --> 01:08:02.880
Of course, there are other biological consequences. We know STIs and things like that. But these are

01:08:02.880 --> 01:08:08.800
the ones that are related to the discussion we're having here of the temporal consequences of sin.

01:08:09.840 --> 01:08:13.360
Because everyone knows the obvious ones. We're talking about the less obvious ones

01:08:14.960 --> 01:08:20.000
that Christian fathers should be teaching to their sons and their daughters. Because women

01:08:20.000 --> 01:08:25.360
need to know this is the thing that is going to happen to your body. You have no control over it.

01:08:25.440 --> 01:08:30.240
No control over it. It is a permanent change. And so there are very real,

01:08:31.280 --> 01:08:40.640
very permanent consequences of being promiscuous. And then to speak on the psychological consequences,

01:08:40.640 --> 01:08:46.640
there is evidence in the literature and really anyone who knows women who have made very poor

01:08:46.640 --> 01:08:51.760
life choices can confirm this. Certainly that's anecdote. But if you get enough anecdotes together,

01:08:51.760 --> 01:08:57.920
the plural actually is data, the psychological consequences for a woman of having many sexual

01:08:57.920 --> 01:09:05.440
partners start to look a lot like schizophrenia. Because there's psychological damage caused to

01:09:05.440 --> 01:09:12.640
a woman by engaging in this behavior. There is also probably some biological basis to it,

01:09:12.640 --> 01:09:19.440
because as mentioned previously, a lot of this DNA, or at least a good portion, ends up in the

01:09:19.440 --> 01:09:24.720
cerebral spinal fluid and ultimately in the woman's brain. We don't yet know exactly what

01:09:24.720 --> 01:09:30.160
is happening there, because some of this research is relatively recent. There's been centuries of

01:09:30.160 --> 01:09:35.040
speculation on these matters, but we now have it very well confirmed. This is established, we know

01:09:35.040 --> 01:09:42.400
this happens. But some of the earliest research, I guess in some cases, is only probably a decade,

01:09:42.400 --> 01:09:50.000
a decade and a half old. So some of this is still in an infancy stage. But we know positively,

01:09:50.000 --> 01:09:56.400
absolutely this is something that is happening. When a woman has sex with a man, she becomes,

01:09:56.400 --> 01:10:04.400
to some small degree, that man. He makes her his own. And so this is part of the reason

01:10:05.040 --> 01:10:11.520
that scripture so vehemently condemns promiscuity and sexual sin. Because sexual sin is indeed

01:10:11.520 --> 01:10:19.360
different in kind from other sins. Now, for men, it doesn't really have these consequences because

01:10:19.360 --> 01:10:23.280
there's nothing from the female body entering you during sex.

01:10:25.120 --> 01:10:29.600
That's not how God designed it. There's a reason God describes women as a field,

01:10:29.600 --> 01:10:35.760
and men are the ones sowing the seed. The field doesn't really change the farmer. The farmer

01:10:35.760 --> 01:10:44.480
changes the field. That is how God designed it. That is how God wants it to work. Because the wife

01:10:44.480 --> 01:10:52.400
becomes one flesh with her husband, she becomes his. And so as Christians, we have to address this

01:10:52.400 --> 01:10:58.560
because this is something that our culture does not want to accept, does not want to teach.

01:10:59.520 --> 01:11:04.400
Because if you teach this, if you speak on these actual consequences,

01:11:06.720 --> 01:11:12.960
then women are going to be hesitant to be promiscuous. Of course, there are other psychological

01:11:12.960 --> 01:11:19.120
consequences too. We know that there's essentially not quite exponential, but somewhere between

01:11:19.120 --> 01:11:25.040
exponential and linear decline in the success of marriages as you increase the number of sexual

01:11:25.040 --> 01:11:33.680
partners of the wife. Not the husband, but the wife. Because the number of sexual partners a woman

01:11:33.680 --> 01:11:40.160
has is directly related to her ability to pair bond. And so a woman who has had many sexual

01:11:40.160 --> 01:11:46.640
partners will not be able to pair bond. And if she cannot pair bond, the marriage is not going to

01:11:46.640 --> 01:11:54.560
succeed. Are there exceptions? Some few. But you're playing the odds, and the odds are not in your

01:11:54.640 --> 01:12:01.680
favor. And so that right there is why so many Christians and others do not want to recognize

01:12:01.680 --> 01:12:07.680
this reality. Because this is a temporal consequence of sin. And it is a permanent

01:12:08.480 --> 01:12:14.000
consequence of sin, permanent in the sense that in this life, it cannot be fixed. It cannot be

01:12:14.000 --> 01:12:20.240
changed. These women are permanently damaged because of their past actions. And there is

01:12:20.240 --> 01:12:26.000
nothing we can do to change that. They are going to have less of an ability to pair bond.

01:12:26.000 --> 01:12:31.920
Their children are going to be less related to their supposed fathers. This is simply the

01:12:31.920 --> 01:12:40.000
reality, the biological reality of how God made women. And so we have to deal with that. If we

01:12:40.000 --> 01:12:45.520
just obey God, if we listen to what he says in scripture, if we were faithful to what he commands,

01:12:45.520 --> 01:12:50.800
none of this would be a problem. This would be great. This is a good thing. This helps build

01:12:51.360 --> 01:12:58.240
families. This helps build marriages. This creates a stable society. But when we live in a society

01:12:58.240 --> 01:13:04.080
that is an open rebellion against the things that God says are good against the things that God

01:13:04.080 --> 01:13:13.200
commands us to do, this is damning. This destroys people. And we want to be able to say, speaking

01:13:13.200 --> 01:13:19.840
as the general generic sort of Christian, they want to be able to say, well, if you just believe in

01:13:19.840 --> 01:13:28.240
Jesus, all your problems will go away. It's a sort of therapeutic gospel. And it's false. All your

01:13:28.240 --> 01:13:33.440
problems will not go away. That is not what God promises. Your eternal problems will go away

01:13:33.440 --> 01:13:38.160
because you don't go to hell. That's certainly important. That is the most important thing.

01:13:38.160 --> 01:13:40.720
But the temporal consequences are real and they remain.

01:13:42.480 --> 01:13:48.400
You are not going to be cured of the STIs you've acquired through a libertine lifestyle.

01:13:49.040 --> 01:13:53.040
You are not going to have all the foreign DNA removed from your body if you're a woman or

01:13:53.040 --> 01:14:01.600
incidentally a homosexual male if you become a Christian. These things remain. These consequences

01:14:01.680 --> 01:14:08.480
remain. Yes, the eternal punishment for the actions that led to the temporal consequences,

01:14:09.040 --> 01:14:13.760
those eternal consequences are removed. But the temporal ones are not.

01:14:15.120 --> 01:14:20.640
And we do a great disservice to the younger generations, particularly parents and grandparents,

01:14:20.640 --> 01:14:25.440
do a great disservice to their children and grandchildren when they do not tell them these

01:14:25.440 --> 01:14:30.880
things. Because lying to them about them is one thing. Yes, that's certainly sinful.

01:14:30.880 --> 01:14:36.080
And that's a problem. You are derelict in your duty, but failing to teach them these things

01:14:36.080 --> 01:14:40.400
is also sinful because you are to train up a child in the way he should go.

01:14:41.120 --> 01:14:44.400
Because that promise of God that when he is old, he will not depart from it

01:14:45.040 --> 01:14:48.640
doesn't apply if you don't do the train up a child in the way he should go apart.

01:14:49.920 --> 01:14:58.080
The basic takeaway from this is that there are very real biological and psychological

01:14:58.080 --> 01:15:05.840
consequences of sex, particularly for women. And the consequences are temporally permanent.

01:15:06.720 --> 01:15:13.520
And so Christians need to recognize this and teach future generations these truths so that they can

01:15:14.160 --> 01:15:20.800
at least have the information necessary, maybe to make better decisions than the last handful

01:15:20.800 --> 01:15:25.280
of generations with regard to these matters. Because things are certainly now not trending

01:15:25.280 --> 01:15:33.840
upward. Because we continue to lie to the younger generations about the very real consequences

01:15:33.840 --> 01:15:37.200
of these lifestyles that are supposedly consequence-free.

01:15:37.920 --> 01:15:42.640
I'm sure that there are a lot of people listening right now who are shaking your head some disbelief.

01:15:42.640 --> 01:15:48.080
It sounds like a completely insane theory. We're going to put a number of links in the show notes.

01:15:48.080 --> 01:15:53.840
You can just Google microchimerism as in chimera. That is literally what we're talking about.

01:15:53.840 --> 01:16:00.080
We're talking about small-scale chimeric changes. It sounds insane. It sounds fanciful. It sounds

01:16:00.080 --> 01:16:06.080
like sci-fi. It sounds certainly sexist because there's two men saying women will be screwed up if

01:16:06.080 --> 01:16:11.280
you sleep around and men are not affected to the same degree. Everything about what Cori has just

01:16:11.280 --> 01:16:17.600
said is blasphemy against the spirit of this age. That's part of why we're talking about it.

01:16:18.400 --> 01:16:22.080
I would guess that most of you have probably never heard about this before. Or maybe if you've

01:16:22.080 --> 01:16:26.880
heard about it, you haven't thought about the consequences that it has for yourself and for

01:16:26.880 --> 01:16:35.200
your spouse, for your children. Think about what Cori has just said in terms of the two different

01:16:35.200 --> 01:16:42.560
ways to approach God's order. We talk a lot on Stone Choir about God ordered things in such a way.

01:16:43.760 --> 01:16:49.440
God says, do this and then we can either obey him or we can disobey him. It can go either way.

01:16:49.920 --> 01:16:56.640
You can do whatever you want. God rarely intervenes and prevents someone from disobeying him.

01:16:56.640 --> 01:17:02.160
That happens sometimes. It's part of the point of this episode. God does intervene. Most of the

01:17:02.160 --> 01:17:08.800
time, if you want to go off in sin, it's going to happen. Then you're going to suffer the consequences.

01:17:10.480 --> 01:17:13.200
The point of this part of the episode is that

01:17:13.840 --> 01:17:22.320
it's an orderly marriage where there's a union of one man and one woman in matrimony,

01:17:22.320 --> 01:17:28.160
the one flesh union, where they're both virgins coming in. Think about the consequences of

01:17:28.160 --> 01:17:32.320
microchimerism and that Cori described it. I just want to reiterate to emphasize,

01:17:33.040 --> 01:17:39.920
it's a fork in the road. On one hand, if you obey God, you the husband with your virgin wife,

01:17:39.920 --> 01:17:47.280
every time you lie down together, she becomes more yours. You become more one. It's not just

01:17:47.280 --> 01:17:55.120
a temporal one until you're done. She becomes more you, more yours every single time your entire life.

01:17:55.680 --> 01:18:00.800
By the end of your life, she was far more yours than when you took her hand in marriage.

01:18:01.600 --> 01:18:08.400
That's a blessing from God. That's absolutely a blessing. When you're not using contraception,

01:18:09.120 --> 01:18:15.680
more often than not, God is going to bless your physical union with children, with child after

01:18:15.680 --> 01:18:22.640
child. As Cori described, what happens when there's a baby in the mother's womb? The placental barrier

01:18:22.640 --> 01:18:29.200
is not an absolute barrier against the sharing of DNA. Just as in the case with the spermatozoa,

01:18:29.200 --> 01:18:35.520
I want to make explicit, we're not saying that the sperm somehow gets into the cerebrospinal fluid.

01:18:35.520 --> 01:18:44.880
However, the DNA does, not in every case, but the more times that a woman has a man inside her,

01:18:44.880 --> 01:18:50.720
the more chances there are for that foreign DNA to become a part of her body. Because of the

01:18:50.720 --> 01:18:55.760
circulatory system, it just floats around. There's no way of knowing or predicting where it's going

01:18:55.760 --> 01:19:02.560
to settle. Now, they've found in most of the organs in the body at various times, they have

01:19:02.560 --> 01:19:09.360
discovered male DNA inside women. It's the DNA. It's not just cells. It's subparts of cells. It's

01:19:09.360 --> 01:19:16.240
the DNA which then propagate for decades. There was one case that I read about where a 94-year-old

01:19:16.240 --> 01:19:23.040
woman had a substantial amount of male DNA in whatever part of her body that they were introspecting.

01:19:23.840 --> 01:19:30.240
Obviously, if she had had children, that would have been decades and decades prior. It's not just

01:19:30.240 --> 01:19:36.320
DNA floated around and then eventually got disposed of. It becomes a part of the woman's body

01:19:36.320 --> 01:19:43.680
and her own body perpetuates that foreign DNA as its own. She becomes less herself and more

01:19:44.320 --> 01:19:49.280
the man with whom she has had sex. So, when you're properly ordering these things,

01:19:49.840 --> 01:19:57.120
that man is your husband. Every time you have sex, there's more of him in you,

01:19:57.200 --> 01:20:02.800
remaining. Every time you have a child, that child becomes a part of you. That's not just a metaphor.

01:20:03.760 --> 01:20:08.480
Mothers talk about their children being a part of them. We now know scientifically,

01:20:09.520 --> 01:20:15.120
the scientific part is certainly less important than the metaphysical, spiritual part of a child

01:20:15.120 --> 01:20:21.920
being of the mother, but it's also physically real. The more children that she has, the more of their

01:20:21.920 --> 01:20:29.200
DNA is in her. The children's DNA propagates as well. The firstborn will propagate his or

01:20:29.200 --> 01:20:34.800
her DNA to subsequent offspring so that the children will be even more closely related.

01:20:37.600 --> 01:20:41.680
This is a blessing. This is a beautiful thing. As Corey said, this is how God designed

01:20:41.680 --> 01:20:49.040
all this to work. That is absolutely a beautiful miracle for a family to be so closely united

01:20:49.040 --> 01:20:55.120
that they're all fundamentally of the Father by virtue of that union. That's incredible.

01:20:55.920 --> 01:21:01.840
And on the flip side, you have the girl who whores, the girl who chases after man after

01:21:01.840 --> 01:21:07.680
man and does the same things except in a disordered fashion. The more times that happens,

01:21:08.320 --> 01:21:14.960
the more disjoint her own insides become, the more separate people she has in tiny pieces in her.

01:21:15.440 --> 01:21:19.920
And as Corey mentioned, I want to say this explicitly, the more times that a girl has had

01:21:19.920 --> 01:21:26.640
sex with different men, the greater the likelihood and the greater degree that any offspring you

01:21:26.640 --> 01:21:32.080
have with her, your with her, will not be your own, not to the same degree as if she were a virgin.

01:21:32.080 --> 01:21:38.320
Yes, they'll mostly come from your DNA, but some of the DNA in your children of a girl who has been

01:21:38.320 --> 01:21:43.920
whoring will be the other men. They will leave their mark on her and it will be in your children.

01:21:44.560 --> 01:21:50.240
And we see examples sometimes where that may actually have been the case. When you see a twin,

01:21:51.040 --> 01:21:54.960
twins where one is black and the other is white from the same biological parents,

01:21:54.960 --> 01:22:00.960
everyone's like, oh, it's a miracle. Race isn't real. Well, race is real. I would bet a large

01:22:01.600 --> 01:22:06.880
amount of folding money that that woman in that particular example had had sex with an African

01:22:06.880 --> 01:22:12.960
American and his DNA was hanging out enough to change her the skin color of one of the children.

01:22:14.880 --> 01:22:19.440
These have real consequences. As Corey said, they have psychological consequences too,

01:22:19.440 --> 01:22:23.120
particularly because some of this does literally get into the brain. And we're not just talking

01:22:23.120 --> 01:22:28.960
about DNA floating around in the fluid. It literally gets into the cells, which then replicate.

01:22:28.960 --> 01:22:35.200
And so the brain of a woman in some small part is replaced by the brain of whichever man has been

01:22:35.200 --> 01:22:42.240
inside her. If it's your wife, that's a blessing. If it's random men, that's absolutely a curse.

01:22:42.240 --> 01:22:47.440
It's horrifying. And so part of the reason that we broke our general rule with this episode of

01:22:47.440 --> 01:22:52.160
trying to avoid subjects that you wouldn't be able to listen to with your kids,

01:22:52.160 --> 01:22:57.120
is that this is so important for you to share with your kids. And whatever manner is suitable,

01:22:57.120 --> 01:23:01.520
they don't need to listen to this. They need to hear from you. Don't ever have sex with anyone

01:23:01.520 --> 01:23:08.080
who is not your spouse, ever. One man, one woman forever. Any deviation from that makes things

01:23:08.080 --> 01:23:13.920
exponentially worse. And to the point of the temporal consequences, it's permanent. There's

01:23:13.920 --> 01:23:20.960
no undo for this. There's forgiveness, but there's no undo. It's fundamentally the same

01:23:20.960 --> 01:23:27.040
as a man or a woman deciding that they're transsexual. And that they need to mutilate their

01:23:27.040 --> 01:23:33.600
body to be the other sex. So men will chop off their genitals, women will chop off their breasts.

01:23:34.560 --> 01:23:40.560
If, on the rare occasions when those people repent and return to Christ, their body parts

01:23:40.560 --> 01:23:46.960
don't grow back, once you mutilate your body, once you do this physical harm that is an obvious

01:23:47.680 --> 01:23:54.320
punishment for the sin you're committing, there's no undo. God will fix you in the resurrection

01:23:54.320 --> 01:23:58.480
to what degree we don't know. We don't know what our perfect resurrected bodies are going to be like

01:23:58.560 --> 01:24:05.520
except that they'll be ours. But we do know that until you die, you're going to be the way you are.

01:24:05.520 --> 01:24:12.240
Whatever you damage stays that way. That is a big deal. And the reason that we want to talk about

01:24:12.240 --> 01:24:18.960
this is that don't do the crime and you won't face the punishment. See, when we talk about temporal

01:24:18.960 --> 01:24:27.360
consequences, in the case of David and Bathsheba and Uriah and Nathan, when Nathan came to David

01:24:27.360 --> 01:24:32.720
and said to him what God proclaimed that his child would die, there wasn't a direct connection

01:24:32.720 --> 01:24:37.760
between his action and the child dying. The child died as a punishment against David.

01:24:38.400 --> 01:24:44.000
However, in these other cases, it's much more obvious what the connection is. If you're a man

01:24:44.000 --> 01:24:50.800
who thinks you're a woman and you chop off your penis, what's the punishment for that? It worked.

01:24:51.920 --> 01:24:56.080
That's the punishment. It worked. When we sin against our own bodies, it works.

01:24:56.640 --> 01:25:01.280
God doesn't need to have some other separate punishment to just be delivered from the sky,

01:25:02.080 --> 01:25:06.800
not discounting at all that that will happen. We know for a fact it happened to Sodom and Gomorrah.

01:25:07.360 --> 01:25:13.200
But the immediate effect is what is described at the end of Romans 1. For this reason,

01:25:13.200 --> 01:25:18.800
God gave them up to dishonorable passions for their women exchange natural relations for those

01:25:18.800 --> 01:25:24.080
that are contrary to nature. And the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were

01:25:24.080 --> 01:25:29.600
consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in

01:25:29.600 --> 01:25:35.840
themselves the due penalty for their error. That's explicitly a temporal punishment.

01:25:36.400 --> 01:25:42.960
And it wasn't fireballs from the sky. It was STDs. It was corruption of the flesh as a direct

01:25:42.960 --> 01:25:49.120
consequence of the flesh being used for corrupt purposes. So when we're talking today about

01:25:49.200 --> 01:25:56.160
temporal consequences in opposition to a deistic God, this is why Satan wants us to believe.

01:25:56.800 --> 01:26:01.040
If you want to believe in God, the Creator, that's fine, but he doesn't do anything.

01:26:01.040 --> 01:26:05.360
He's not really watching. Maybe there's a judgment date someday, but you can live your life however

01:26:05.360 --> 01:26:10.160
you want and there'll be no consequences. Jesus died for everything and you're saved and that's

01:26:10.160 --> 01:26:17.520
great. Don't worry about it. The reality is very different. The God of Scripture says,

01:26:17.520 --> 01:26:23.600
when you sin against him, you may well face consequences. He doesn't promise, again,

01:26:23.600 --> 01:26:28.400
there will be a one-to-one relationship, but he promises that there is a due penalty for those

01:26:28.400 --> 01:26:36.800
sins. And if you receive it, you can't do anything but confess. And so one of the things that's

01:26:36.800 --> 01:26:43.040
happened recently in Lutheranism in the last few years, there was a blow up not long ago related to

01:26:43.440 --> 01:26:53.040
the claim online that men prefer debt-free virgins without tattoos. Now, this is a true claim.

01:26:53.040 --> 01:26:59.280
This is a moral claim. It is what some would call a judgmental claim. And that's the root of this.

01:26:59.280 --> 01:27:05.600
That's the root of the antinomian spirit within so much of Christianity today. When a man says,

01:27:05.600 --> 01:27:10.960
I would prefer to marry a girl who is debt-free, she's a virgin and she doesn't have tattoos.

01:27:11.920 --> 01:27:18.480
The immediate response from the antinomian is shrieking in rage and terror. How dare you judge

01:27:18.480 --> 01:27:24.560
someone for their past actions? She confessed, she repented, God forgives her, you must do the same.

01:27:25.440 --> 01:27:30.320
And that's a complete sleight of hand because that's not at all what's being talked about.

01:27:31.200 --> 01:27:38.400
If you have a girl who is $200,000 in debt, who has slept with 30 men and who's covered

01:27:38.480 --> 01:27:44.960
in tattoos, she's going to be a worse wife. Absolutely, period, she's going to be a worse

01:27:44.960 --> 01:27:51.600
wife. Christians should be able to say that because it's plainly obvious. If she's $200,000

01:27:51.600 --> 01:27:56.800
in debt or any amount of debt, what is that going to do to your family finances? Well now,

01:27:56.800 --> 01:28:03.040
you're a debt slave for the bad decisions of her father before you even met her. If she's a whore,

01:28:03.040 --> 01:28:07.280
you now are going to have children with a woman who's not going to be able to properly bond with

01:28:07.280 --> 01:28:11.440
you and your kids won't be related to you, not to the same degree as if she were actually yours.

01:28:12.400 --> 01:28:17.760
And tattoos are self-loathing. When a girl is covered in tattoos, she's saying, I hate myself.

01:28:18.800 --> 01:28:22.960
Usually they go hand in hand because she's so messed up from the other bad choices

01:28:22.960 --> 01:28:29.360
that she has left herself in such a state that even when she turns to God, pray that every

01:28:29.360 --> 01:28:37.120
single one of them would, would repent of those sins, would return to the flock, and would stop

01:28:37.120 --> 01:28:44.480
doing those things. The point of this is that the temporal consequences remain. She can be forgiven

01:28:44.480 --> 01:28:50.800
by God for all those things. She's still $200,000 in debt. She still has a body riddled with other

01:28:50.800 --> 01:28:56.800
men's DNA. She still has a body that's been defaced in opposition to how God made her flesh.

01:28:57.440 --> 01:29:03.520
And so when you as a man are looking at two prospective mates, you must choose the one who

01:29:03.520 --> 01:29:09.280
is going to be a better choice for you. That's a matter of wisdom. Now, part of the problem that

01:29:09.280 --> 01:29:15.920
we have today is that so many people are screwed up, so many people have sinned so grievously

01:29:15.920 --> 01:29:21.200
that it's almost impossible to find a girl that doesn't have a body count. That's consequential.

01:29:21.200 --> 01:29:27.680
And there's a small way in which the people who say we have to just forgive her and move on

01:29:28.240 --> 01:29:34.880
are not entirely wrong. And that is this one narrow point. As a generation where virtually every girl

01:29:34.880 --> 01:29:41.280
has done these things, the only way to perpetuate the human race is for some of them to get married

01:29:41.280 --> 01:29:46.560
and to have kids. And maybe you have a broken generation or two, but then if they're faithful,

01:29:46.640 --> 01:29:51.520
you can put things back together. But if you as a man have a choice between one type of girl and

01:29:51.520 --> 01:29:56.720
the other, you only have one choice. You should never choose the girl who has done this sort

01:29:56.720 --> 01:30:01.440
of harm to herself, because it's not a question of you holding her past sins against her. And

01:30:01.440 --> 01:30:07.760
that's a crucial point here. It's not saying Jesus forgave her, but I'm not going to. Jesus

01:30:07.760 --> 01:30:12.720
forgives her in eternity. You can tell that Jesus hasn't lifted the penalty for her temporal

01:30:13.520 --> 01:30:18.480
sins because she's still stuck with them. She's still riddled with another man's DNA and covered

01:30:18.480 --> 01:30:23.920
in tattoos and $200,000 in debt. If Jesus had forgiven those in the sense that they mean that

01:30:23.920 --> 01:30:28.000
you care about, they would all vanish. She would go back to being a virgin. She would go back to

01:30:28.000 --> 01:30:33.840
being the 16-year-old girl under her father's roof before all those bad choices were made.

01:30:34.640 --> 01:30:43.760
So when Christians try to set soteriology of Jesus' relationship to us and forgiving our sins

01:30:44.320 --> 01:30:51.200
against what we have to live with in this life, it's a false dichotomy, and it's one that ultimately

01:30:51.200 --> 01:30:56.800
will lead to destruction. Because as Corey says, if you forgive all those sins, if you fall in love

01:30:56.800 --> 01:31:03.600
with her madly, and you want to marry the girl who has all those problems, you're going to live

01:31:03.600 --> 01:31:08.960
with the consequences of that. She will have more mental problems. She absolutely will. She will

01:31:08.960 --> 01:31:14.560
not love you as much as a girl who never did those things because she biologically can't.

01:31:15.360 --> 01:31:20.560
I think that's the key takeaway from that one aspect of it. A girl who has had sex with multiple

01:31:20.560 --> 01:31:27.680
men literally cannot love her husband as much as one who hasn't. It's a fact. There are links in

01:31:27.680 --> 01:31:32.320
the show notes to demonstrate this. It sounds unforgiving. It sounds unchristian. It sounds

01:31:32.400 --> 01:31:37.360
like we're trying to set science in all this new stuff in opposition to what Scripture says.

01:31:37.360 --> 01:31:41.520
The point we're making is that Scripture says what we say. Scripture says that there's a temporal

01:31:41.520 --> 01:31:46.480
punishment for sins, and sometimes you can't see it. Sometimes it doesn't happen. Sometimes you

01:31:46.480 --> 01:31:51.360
don't know about it. You certainly can't see microchimerism. You can meet a girl who will lie

01:31:51.360 --> 01:31:56.560
about her body count and say she's a virgin or say one or two guys. Well, that's not too bad.

01:31:57.520 --> 01:32:04.000
You can't see the consequences, but they're there. Like we talked about in the last couple

01:32:04.000 --> 01:32:09.520
episodes, the reason for sharing these things is not even so much for the guys who are listening

01:32:09.520 --> 01:32:14.080
to try to find a wife, although it's certainly for you. It's really, in large part, for you,

01:32:14.080 --> 01:32:17.520
if you're going to find a wife and then have kids or the parents in the audience,

01:32:18.560 --> 01:32:22.720
make sure that your kids don't make any of these mistakes to begin with. Obviously,

01:32:22.800 --> 01:32:29.600
that's impossible to do perfectly, but warn them. Tell your daughters every man you sleep with becomes

01:32:29.600 --> 01:32:35.440
a part of you forever, and when someday you decide you want to settle down and give your

01:32:35.440 --> 01:32:40.560
husband children, they won't be his. Most girls are going to find that pretty horrifying. Some of

01:32:40.560 --> 01:32:44.400
the girls who are listening right now probably find that pretty horrifying. I can assure you,

01:32:44.400 --> 01:32:50.240
the men who hear it, including myself, find it horrifying. That's messed up. Why? Because it's

01:32:50.240 --> 01:32:55.280
not how God designed things. God designed things where one man and one woman come together,

01:32:55.280 --> 01:33:00.880
and that's it. The propagation within that family unit is a beautiful, wholesome thing.

01:33:00.880 --> 01:33:06.960
We've created the opposite with our disobedience, and we can't paper over the consequences of that.

01:33:08.480 --> 01:33:13.760
We're going to have to do the best we can with this generation and pray that the next generation

01:33:13.760 --> 01:33:19.360
will heed the warning of our own, to heed the warning of, hey, don't do all these stupid things

01:33:19.360 --> 01:33:23.440
that we've done because they're destructive. Not only do scriptures hate it, but if you're

01:33:23.440 --> 01:33:28.160
dumb enough to need science to tell you too, we got both now. We can absolutely prove that

01:33:28.160 --> 01:33:32.640
you're destroying your life by doing these things. Whatever reason is good enough for you not to do

01:33:32.640 --> 01:33:38.320
them, go with it. It should be God's obedience, and that's the point. The reason we talk about

01:33:38.320 --> 01:33:43.840
God says, and when we don't do, we get the consequences, is that that's what God says.

01:33:43.840 --> 01:33:48.000
If you just obey God and you don't know anything about science, you don't know anything about

01:33:48.000 --> 01:33:53.600
how any of this stuff works, it doesn't matter. The obedient person who serves God faithfully

01:33:53.600 --> 01:33:58.800
will simply never face these consequences. That is a blessing, and that is what we should

01:33:58.800 --> 01:34:03.360
be sharing with our children in future generations. What we're dealing with here,

01:34:04.240 --> 01:34:08.880
really, when we speak on the issue of temporal consequences and more so,

01:34:09.760 --> 01:34:18.400
those who more or less reject temporal consequences is Gnosticism. It's an ancient heresy that

01:34:18.400 --> 01:34:23.280
continually crops up in the church, and there are some who will say that

01:34:24.560 --> 01:34:29.680
Christians are paranoid about Gnosticism, at least certain Christians, and they see it everywhere.

01:34:30.800 --> 01:34:35.120
The problem is that it is everywhere and that it constantly crops up. It is something that we have

01:34:35.200 --> 01:34:42.080
been fighting in the church for millennia, very actively, certainly for centuries.

01:34:43.200 --> 01:34:48.960
It comes in ebb and flow. Sometimes it is a very strong opponent to the church,

01:34:49.600 --> 01:34:53.040
sometimes it's weaker. Today, it's very strong.

01:34:56.000 --> 01:35:01.840
In our society, we have a very weird relationship to the body, to the flesh,

01:35:02.800 --> 01:35:08.800
because there's a very strong strain of transhumanism in modern thought, the idea that we can

01:35:08.800 --> 01:35:17.040
transcend this mortal coil and become something greater, whether it is through hallucinogens,

01:35:17.040 --> 01:35:23.280
some try that route, or body modification, which is to say, perhaps cybernetics,

01:35:24.000 --> 01:35:28.480
or genetic engineering, whatever it is, there's this belief that we can transcend

01:35:29.440 --> 01:35:36.560
our mere flesh. Then on the other hand, there are those who totally deny the flesh and focus

01:35:36.560 --> 01:35:43.360
instead on the spirit and think, well, the flesh doesn't matter. Ultimately, we're a spirit,

01:35:43.360 --> 01:35:50.000
and so what happens to the flesh is irrelevant. That is part of some forms of ancient paganism,

01:35:50.000 --> 01:35:56.160
particularly the Greek paganism, to some degree the Romans. There's a bit of it in Hinduism and

01:35:56.160 --> 01:36:01.280
other places, certainly the escape from Samsara, things like that, but

01:36:03.360 --> 01:36:14.000
Gnosticism tells you to deny the reality of the flesh. That is what underlies those who argue

01:36:15.920 --> 01:36:21.520
against temporal consequences for sin. What they're ultimately saying is that it's the spirit

01:36:21.520 --> 01:36:27.120
alone that matters, and the flesh isn't real, because as soon as you are converted,

01:36:27.760 --> 01:36:32.720
as soon as you believe in Christ, as soon as you have faith, well, your spirit is now right with

01:36:32.720 --> 01:36:37.840
God, and so the flesh, well, that's irrelevant. That's just something you have for a time, and

01:36:37.840 --> 01:36:43.520
no, that's not what Scripture says. That's not what God made. You are body and soul. You are not

01:36:44.160 --> 01:36:50.800
soul writing around in body. You are not body that happens to have a soul. You are soul and body,

01:36:50.800 --> 01:36:59.200
body and soul. You are both of those as a human being. If you lose either of those, you're incomplete.

01:37:01.440 --> 01:37:05.280
And so the destruction of the flesh, of course, yes, is one thing you have.

01:37:05.840 --> 01:37:10.000
Christ says, don't be afraid of those who can kill your body, rather fear God alone who can

01:37:10.000 --> 01:37:16.880
destroy both body and soul in hell. But those are both real. That's why they're both mentioned

01:37:16.880 --> 01:37:22.160
there. Because both the body and the soul can be destroyed, and note what it says about hell.

01:37:22.960 --> 01:37:31.200
Body and soul. Those in hell are still body and soul, because that is what it means to be a human

01:37:31.200 --> 01:37:38.640
being. And so when you deny the reality of temporal consequences, when you deny the reality of biology,

01:37:38.640 --> 01:37:43.760
whatever it happens to be, whether you deny that microchimerism happens, whether you deny that there

01:37:43.840 --> 01:37:49.360
psychological consequences, in this case with a biological basis for women who are promiscuous,

01:37:49.360 --> 01:37:55.280
or you deny the reality of the sexes, you deny the reality of race, whatever it happens to be,

01:37:55.840 --> 01:38:02.160
whichever one of these biological truths you deny, ultimately what you are doing is rejecting the

01:38:02.160 --> 01:38:07.920
reality of the flesh and telling God that he's wrong and know I'm just a spirit and this flesh

01:38:07.920 --> 01:38:15.360
is just something you gave me for a time and it really doesn't matter. That is not what it means

01:38:15.360 --> 01:38:22.640
to be a human being. That is not what scripture teaches, that is not what Christians are permitted

01:38:22.640 --> 01:38:30.800
to hold or must hold. Christians must hold that the flesh is real. Both the flesh and the spirit.

01:38:30.960 --> 01:38:37.680
As I've mentioned before, when this topic has arisen, I am deliberately ignoring dualism

01:38:37.680 --> 01:38:42.400
versus trealism. I hold to the latter. That's not the discussion right now.

01:38:43.600 --> 01:38:50.400
You are body and soul. You have to affirm, as a Christian, the reality of both. And the flesh

01:38:50.400 --> 01:38:58.720
comes with very real consequences in time when you abuse the flesh, or when you suffer something,

01:38:58.720 --> 01:39:03.280
because of course it's not always abuse. If you lose a limb, having faith in Christ does not

01:39:03.280 --> 01:39:10.240
regrow the limb, and you may have lost that due to no error on your part. Because sin does not

01:39:10.240 --> 01:39:17.200
have consequences just for the sinner. Sin has consequences for everyone around the sinner.

01:39:18.160 --> 01:39:23.760
Sin has consequences for creation. Creation fell because Adam sinned.

01:39:24.480 --> 01:39:32.720
Everything was subjected to futility because of Adam's sin. Your pets die because Adam sinned.

01:39:32.720 --> 01:39:39.520
Your pets die because you sinned. Sin has very real consequences here in time. It will also

01:39:39.520 --> 01:39:44.960
have consequences in eternity if you do not believe in Christ. But the consequences in time

01:39:45.520 --> 01:39:51.120
are not removed simply because you have faith. They will be removed in eternity

01:39:51.760 --> 01:39:59.120
because you will be perfect. But they are not removed in time. And to deny that is to become

01:39:59.120 --> 01:40:08.160
agnostic. And a Christian cannot be agnostic because Gnosticism is a rejection of Scripture.

01:40:08.160 --> 01:40:12.880
It is a rejection of God's truth. And it is also a rejection of what it means to be human.

01:40:12.880 --> 01:40:16.880
It is a rejection of our nature and our essence, which of course is again

01:40:16.960 --> 01:40:21.440
a rejection of God because rejecting the creation is rejecting the Creator.

01:40:22.640 --> 01:40:30.800
And so that is why we keep bringing up these sorts of topics. Because there are Christians who

01:40:30.800 --> 01:40:36.160
stumble into these heresies because they listen to the world and they don't pay attention. They

01:40:36.160 --> 01:40:41.920
don't assess. They don't look critically at what it is they're being told to believe. And so they

01:40:41.920 --> 01:40:48.320
stumble into heretical position. Now maybe felicitous inconsistency will save them. Maybe they

01:40:48.320 --> 01:40:54.080
don't really ultimately in their heart of hearts believe these lies they profess. Maybe they trust

01:40:54.080 --> 01:40:59.440
in Christ alone. But that isn't the position that you want to take before the judgment throne.

01:41:01.280 --> 01:41:07.200
You want to hold to a true confession that doesn't have all these little lies attached to it.

01:41:07.920 --> 01:41:12.880
You don't want to have to rely on, well, someone lied to me and I was deceived and that's not an

01:41:12.880 --> 01:41:19.120
excuse. Certainly it is better to have been deceived and believed something false

01:41:19.120 --> 01:41:24.000
than it is to willfully believe something false. But ignorance is not an excuse.

01:41:25.440 --> 01:41:32.240
The pagans who lived in deepest, darkest Africa millennia ago and never heard the Gospel

01:41:32.320 --> 01:41:38.640
did not therefore have an excuse. Because God's law is written on the human heart

01:41:38.640 --> 01:41:44.000
and there are very real consequences in time for the individual and generationally for that

01:41:44.000 --> 01:41:54.400
person's progeny when that man sins. So do not think that as a Christian you can just say,

01:41:54.400 --> 01:41:58.880
well, I believe in Christ and therefore all these other things are irrelevant.

01:41:59.840 --> 01:42:04.480
That is not how it works. Belief in Christ is the most important thing, yes.

01:42:05.760 --> 01:42:10.800
But all of the other truths flow from that. Because if you believe in God, if you believe

01:42:10.800 --> 01:42:16.080
in Christ, if you believe in this ultimate crown of reality and truth, then you must

01:42:16.080 --> 01:42:22.480
believe everything else about him. Not just that he gave his only begotten son to die for you,

01:42:23.040 --> 01:42:26.640
that he raised him again from the dead, that you are covered in his blood,

01:42:27.600 --> 01:42:33.200
that you are made whole in Christ, that you're forgiven. Because there are other truths about

01:42:33.200 --> 01:42:38.160
God, he reveals them in nature, he reveals them in Scripture, and as Christians we are

01:42:38.160 --> 01:42:44.640
beholden to believe in those things. Because to believe otherwise is to believe something

01:42:44.640 --> 01:42:52.720
false about God at best, and at worst it is to accuse God of lying. And if you accuse God of lying,

01:42:53.040 --> 01:43:00.240
things don't get better from there. You will eventually apostatize. That is the end of that

01:43:00.240 --> 01:43:07.680
road. That is the broad path. And so all of these truths about God that we keep mentioning in these

01:43:07.680 --> 01:43:13.040
episodes, the reason they are important, as we have said so many times, they are not the core of

01:43:13.040 --> 01:43:19.760
the faith. That's not the point. The point is, if you believe a lie, if you believe any lie,

01:43:19.760 --> 01:43:25.040
because Satan's goal is to get you to believe any lie. He just wants an opening somewhere,

01:43:25.040 --> 01:43:28.800
doesn't matter, he doesn't need you to open the front door, just open the back window,

01:43:28.800 --> 01:43:35.440
he'll happily climb in. If you believe a lie, then you will eventually be faced with a choice.

01:43:36.560 --> 01:43:43.040
And that choice will be accepting you believe the lie, rejecting it and believing the truth,

01:43:43.040 --> 01:43:49.600
which is what we are calling you to do, or you can refuse to accept that you believed a lie,

01:43:49.600 --> 01:43:55.360
because it's uncomfortable to have to admit that, and you can double down. And you'll double down

01:43:55.360 --> 01:44:02.320
by believing another lie, and another lie, and another lie, and it never ends, because as we've

01:44:02.320 --> 01:44:09.840
said many times, there's no floor, it can always get worse. And so yes, there are temporal consequences

01:44:09.840 --> 01:44:16.720
of sin. Yes, those stick with you. Yes, those will not go away in this life in many cases.

01:44:17.680 --> 01:44:21.840
But if you continue sinning, it will continue getting worse. And so stop.

01:44:22.880 --> 01:44:29.840
Turn from your sins, repent, and live the best life you can even with the consequences of your past

01:44:29.840 --> 01:44:38.320
sin. If you don't accept that those consequences are real, you will forever be lying about the

01:44:38.320 --> 01:44:44.480
nature of reality, the nature of your own flesh, and the nature of God. That is not how you have

01:44:44.480 --> 01:44:50.960
a right relationship with God. You have a right relationship with God by accepting His truth,

01:44:51.600 --> 01:44:59.280
accepting the consequences of your past errors, and attempting to live the best life you can going

01:44:59.280 --> 01:45:07.520
forward with what God has given you in light of both God's gifts and the consequences of your

01:45:07.520 --> 01:45:14.640
actions. The Christian life is not a life of perfection. It is a life of repentance,

01:45:15.280 --> 01:45:18.720
and yes, attempting to do better. That is part of the Christian life. You do

01:45:19.440 --> 01:45:25.200
have good works, because good works flow from a living faith. But it's not perfection. You won't

01:45:25.200 --> 01:45:33.120
be perfect in this life, those temporal consequences do remain. As a Christian, affirm the truth,

01:45:33.200 --> 01:45:40.240
and move forward. I want to close with a brief story that's recounting issues, etc. episode from

01:45:40.240 --> 01:45:45.200
2019. As I was listening to it back when I used to still listen to issues and thought that Todd was

01:45:45.200 --> 01:45:51.360
a decent guy, this particular episode that I'm going to recount briefly is where I initially

01:45:52.080 --> 01:46:00.000
had the realization of what we're describing today. The episode was with a woman who at the age of 16

01:46:00.480 --> 01:46:07.760
in 1973 got knocked up by her boyfriend. She hid it from her family, her Lutheran family, until

01:46:07.760 --> 01:46:12.800
she began showing one day her mother realized she was pregnant. Took her straight to the doctor.

01:46:12.800 --> 01:46:16.880
It was a family doctor who was also Lutheran. Don't remember if it was a Lutheran hospital,

01:46:16.880 --> 01:46:24.080
but pretty close. He was very gruff with her. He told the mother point blank, she can't keep it.

01:46:24.080 --> 01:46:29.760
They had 10 kids at home, and so he said, you're not going to be able to, you're going to be equipped

01:46:29.840 --> 01:46:38.720
to handle this child as well. She agreed, and so the 16-year-old girl didn't have any input.

01:46:38.720 --> 01:46:44.400
The decision was made to give the child up for adoption through Lutheran child and family services

01:46:44.400 --> 01:46:53.120
or the precursor to it. She received no prenatal care. She basically just went on with her life.

01:46:53.760 --> 01:46:58.240
She was not taken out of school. The law had been changed, so they weren't able to expel her either,

01:46:58.880 --> 01:47:04.160
so she attended school every day. Pregnant as a teenager, unwed. Her boyfriend skipped,

01:47:04.160 --> 01:47:10.720
he wanted nothing to do with it. She was on her own. She went into labor at school. She came home,

01:47:10.720 --> 01:47:15.360
told her mom she was having contractions. When dad got home, he drove her to the hospital,

01:47:15.360 --> 01:47:19.040
and she was basically on her own. The way she described the delivery was that they wheeled

01:47:19.040 --> 01:47:27.520
her in. They put up a curtain at her midsection. She wasn't able to see anything. She delivered

01:47:27.520 --> 01:47:33.440
the baby. She never even knew if it was a boy or a girl. She never got to hold it, never got to see

01:47:33.440 --> 01:47:41.200
it at all. She literally gave birth, and then the baby vanished. Then she went home. She recuperated,

01:47:41.200 --> 01:47:46.240
and she went back to school, and it was like it never happened. Part of the reason that she was

01:47:46.240 --> 01:47:52.640
telling the story was that she described how not long after she met the nice Lutheran boy and they

01:47:52.640 --> 01:47:59.360
got married and started a family and had a couple other kids. She never told anyone that she had

01:47:59.360 --> 01:48:04.640
had this child at 16. She did learn a few days after the birth that it was a boy, so she knew

01:48:04.640 --> 01:48:10.320
it was a boy, and that was it. She had been told that I believe that they would go. The child would

01:48:10.320 --> 01:48:15.920
be adopted by a Lutheran family. That was the extent of it, but she never knew anything beyond that.

01:48:16.720 --> 01:48:23.360
Fast forward to recent memory. She got on 23 in me because she had Crohn's disease when her

01:48:23.360 --> 01:48:28.880
daughters had Crohn's disease, which is a heritable disease. She was curious. She found her son,

01:48:29.760 --> 01:48:35.200
and so it connected them. She was shocked and terrified and didn't know what to do, but

01:48:36.480 --> 01:48:40.960
excited was the right word. It was like free fall. She didn't know what to feel,

01:48:41.600 --> 01:48:48.080
but she had described her life before that as being one of complete numbness. She described how

01:48:49.280 --> 01:48:56.560
when she gave birth to her children in her marriage, it didn't have the same type of joy that

01:48:58.000 --> 01:49:05.840
it would have had if not for her first child. Until she did the 23 in me, she never told her

01:49:05.840 --> 01:49:11.280
husband. She never told her family. Her and her parents were the only people who knew that she

01:49:11.280 --> 01:49:18.400
had ever been pregnant in her circle of friends. After she met her son, who at this point with

01:49:18.400 --> 01:49:23.040
I think 45 years old, he was an attorney, he had five kids of his own. He was successful and happy

01:49:23.040 --> 01:49:30.480
in Lutheran. It was a good reunion, but it was still very difficult for her. She talked to her

01:49:30.480 --> 01:49:36.320
husband and her kids, and everyone was happy about it. One of the points of the episode,

01:49:36.320 --> 01:49:42.400
as she recounted all these various facts, was her describing her own suffering and emptiness

01:49:43.040 --> 01:49:48.560
from having given birth to a child and then having the child vanish through adoption.

01:49:49.680 --> 01:49:54.880
She said that the child in whom she gave up her adoption forgave her. He understood why it had

01:49:54.880 --> 01:49:59.520
happened. He said he agreed with her it was the right thing to do under the circumstances.

01:50:00.560 --> 01:50:05.600
What struck me about hearing her describe the suffering and the numbness and the

01:50:06.560 --> 01:50:13.360
silent trauma of those events was that there was literally only one difference between her

01:50:13.360 --> 01:50:19.600
second pregnancy and her first. It was the same act of conception. It was the same gestational

01:50:19.600 --> 01:50:26.160
process. It was the same type of birth. The only difference was the moral circumstances

01:50:26.160 --> 01:50:31.840
surrounding with whom she had had sex. In the first case, it was a boyfriend in high school.

01:50:32.400 --> 01:50:38.640
That was wrong. That was disordered. That was not to whom she had been given. She gave herself

01:50:38.640 --> 01:50:46.240
away to someone inappropriately, sinfully. The result of that coupling was that her entire life

01:50:46.240 --> 01:50:51.200
has been scarred. That was one of the things that she talked about. She knew she was forgiven.

01:50:51.200 --> 01:50:57.040
Everyone in her family and her life forgave her. No one holds her morally culpable. And yet,

01:50:57.840 --> 01:51:01.760
to this day, even after having been reunited with him and all the rest,

01:51:01.760 --> 01:51:07.680
her entire life has been defined by the numbness of a pregnancy outside of marriage.

01:51:08.320 --> 01:51:14.560
To the point that it even had a small detriment on her bonding with her subsequent children.

01:51:15.600 --> 01:51:19.680
And what I realized as I was listening to that was how profound that is that if

01:51:19.680 --> 01:51:25.040
her first child had been with her husband, it would have been only joy. It would have been 100%

01:51:25.040 --> 01:51:32.240
joy. It was the single act of disobedience of having sex outside of marriage and the resulting

01:51:32.240 --> 01:51:39.440
pregnancy that set a chain of events in motion that were the temporal consequences of her sin.

01:51:39.440 --> 01:51:45.120
She's forgiven. She's confessed. I'm not holding in her against her morally. I'm not sitting in

01:51:45.120 --> 01:51:50.000
judgment. That's not the point. The point is that the suffering that she endured and continues to

01:51:50.000 --> 01:51:54.160
endure, she still has psychological problems from it. I would imagine this was a few years ago. She's

01:51:54.160 --> 01:52:01.280
probably doing better now that she's reconciled with her adopted son. But the fact remains that she

01:52:02.240 --> 01:52:08.160
lost out on most of her life as being the sort of life it would have been by that one single act.

01:52:08.160 --> 01:52:13.920
And that's the point of this whole episode. All it takes is one deviation from God's commandments

01:52:13.920 --> 01:52:20.560
to potentially wreck your entire life. This is sort of basic parental advice for anyone.

01:52:20.560 --> 01:52:26.000
You make one bad choice. It can ruin your life. The reason that we're discussing it,

01:52:26.000 --> 01:52:32.880
this is even true among Christians. It's even true with Jesus Christ and the forgiveness at the cross.

01:52:33.680 --> 01:52:40.480
Even when you sin and you are forgiven and you confess it, the sin may still harm you for the

01:52:40.480 --> 01:52:47.440
rest of your life. And the only way to fix that is never to do it. There is no undo button.

01:52:47.440 --> 01:52:53.120
There's no undo for her having slept with her boyfriend when she was 16. And she paid for the

01:52:53.120 --> 01:52:59.040
rest of her life for having done that, knowing that she was forgiven. And I think that's one of

01:52:59.040 --> 01:53:05.680
the important parts of this is that it's not psychologizing guilt and loss and separation

01:53:05.760 --> 01:53:10.800
anxiety and all these psychological terms we throw around. She was injured by her sin.

01:53:12.000 --> 01:53:17.200
What should have been the most joyous day of her life became the worst. And the worst day of her

01:53:17.200 --> 01:53:22.400
life became the defining moment of her life. Even though she went on to have a good and happy life,

01:53:22.400 --> 01:53:28.000
it wasn't as good and happy as if she had not done that. And so I would ask everyone who's

01:53:28.000 --> 01:53:32.800
listening to remember that that is the point of this. It is not about sitting in judgment

01:53:33.440 --> 01:53:38.320
retroactively and saying, well, you did this and you did that and we need to do more to you.

01:53:39.040 --> 01:53:44.000
The point is that the only way to prevent these temporal consequences for our sin

01:53:44.000 --> 01:53:49.600
is not to do them in the first place. In the best bet, if you're not going to simply believe

01:53:49.600 --> 01:53:55.280
God and obey him, there's backup. If you believe that God is active in this world, believe that

01:53:55.280 --> 01:54:00.320
there are temporal consequences for your sin. And even if you don't want to obey God for the

01:54:00.320 --> 01:54:06.560
sake of being a faithful creature, perhaps if the curb there is you will only obey him because

01:54:06.560 --> 01:54:11.520
you don't want the consequences, that's fine. You're still obeying God. In the future, God will

01:54:11.520 --> 01:54:15.840
hopefully strengthen and preserve your faith to the point that just obeying him for its own sake

01:54:15.840 --> 01:54:22.800
will be enough. But the only way to prevent any of this harm, any of this damage is not to do the

01:54:22.800 --> 01:54:28.880
sin in the first place. And we're in a generation that is so pervasively affected by this and so

01:54:28.880 --> 01:54:35.520
many other sins that people want to be defensive about their own past actions. Christians need to

01:54:35.520 --> 01:54:41.760
get past that and they need to get past it in part by not relying on the cross as a crutch.

01:54:41.760 --> 01:54:47.360
That's not what it's there for. We're comforted that we're forgiven, but we still need to be

01:54:47.360 --> 01:54:54.400
reminded that there's punishment for evil in this life. God built it that way. God did both of those

01:54:54.400 --> 01:55:02.080
things and the cross is the most important thing, but no less important in terms of shaping our

01:55:02.080 --> 01:55:08.320
lives can be, God's will is revealed to us in Scripture. And in some cases, things that are

01:55:08.320 --> 01:55:15.040
contrary to nature, it's revealed to nature itself. God has organized everything so that we have to go

01:55:15.040 --> 01:55:20.080
out of our way to make things worse. And one of the things we're trying to emphasize is,

01:55:20.960 --> 01:55:29.520
believe God, obey him, and you won't make things worse. To the contrary, if you do disobey God,

01:55:29.520 --> 01:55:35.120
if you do sin either willfully or accidentally and fall into these traps and these errors,

01:55:35.840 --> 01:55:40.800
you may well receive the due punishment in your flesh that will never go away.

01:55:41.600 --> 01:55:47.200
And civilizationally, and as a church, both the left hand and the right hand of Christ,

01:55:47.200 --> 01:55:53.280
we must acknowledge that there's punishment for sin. God paid for everything on the cross.

01:55:53.280 --> 01:55:58.880
The temporal punishments are only paid by those who have committed the sins. And in some cases,

01:55:58.880 --> 01:56:02.400
they're family and their friends and their neighborhoods and their communities. And in

01:56:02.400 --> 01:56:08.560
some cases, they're very civilizations. So this is a matter that affects all of us. It's not about

01:56:08.560 --> 01:56:15.440
secret sins. It's not about retribution. It's about making sure that we teach our children

01:56:15.440 --> 01:56:19.680
and we shape those who still have a chance not to go down these paths to tell them

01:56:19.680 --> 01:56:25.440
how bad it will get. And sometimes, how bad it will get is the best incentive to obey God.

01:56:25.440 --> 01:56:30.080
And later on, you realize what a blessing it is from God to have these things revealed

01:56:30.080 --> 01:56:35.840
and to have people in a senior position to warn you, don't go there. You will only make things

01:56:35.840 --> 01:56:42.400
worse for yourself in a way that will never go away until the resurrection. So if you listen

01:56:42.400 --> 01:56:46.800
with kids, or if you have kids, or if you're going to have kids, talk to them about this.

01:56:47.440 --> 01:56:52.960
This generation is a mess. The next generation doesn't have to be. That's with you. That's

01:56:52.960 --> 01:56:57.840
with the parents. If you have made these mistakes, if your kids are on the path of making these

01:56:57.840 --> 01:57:03.040
mistakes, think about these consequences for the rest of their lives. Think about the ways that

01:57:03.680 --> 01:57:09.200
you can help them avoid suffering and create an environment in your home and in your church

01:57:09.200 --> 01:57:15.600
and your community where we have these curbs around these behaviors so that they just don't

01:57:15.600 --> 01:57:22.160
happen. It used to be that profligate sexual behavior was thoroughly frowned upon. It was

01:57:22.160 --> 01:57:29.600
scorned. It was despised by society. We need to bring that back because when that's being maintained

01:57:29.600 --> 01:57:34.080
at the societal level, you don't need people to even believe in God. They just need to know

01:57:34.080 --> 01:57:38.160
that it's going to hurt if they disobey God. Whether or not they believe in him or not,

01:57:38.160 --> 01:57:44.000
just believing that if I cross the line with these things, I'm going to pay for it socially,

01:57:44.720 --> 01:57:51.120
that will keep people from sinning, from doing evil. That benefits everyone, most of all them.

01:57:52.080 --> 01:57:59.120
Again, to rein in someone's sinful nature through a curb that says if you act like a slut,

01:57:59.120 --> 01:58:04.080
you're going to be scorned and shamed publicly and you're going to have a terrible reputation,

01:58:05.040 --> 01:58:11.040
that should come back. The fact that that went away was a necessary precursor for everything else.

01:58:11.760 --> 01:58:16.320
This is not about finger pointing or recrimination. It's about preventing the evil from occurring in

01:58:16.320 --> 01:58:21.840
the first place because only by preventing the evil from occurring can we avoid the

01:58:21.840 --> 01:58:28.640
temporal consequences. Let's not have more reasons to nail Christ to the cross. As faithful

01:58:28.640 --> 01:58:33.280
Christians, that should be our chief concern. But as Christians living in this world,

01:58:33.280 --> 01:58:38.800
all of these things are equal concerns. We have to be faithful to God. We have to obey him because

01:58:38.800 --> 01:58:43.440
what choice do we have? He's told us these things for our benefit and the more we obey,

01:58:43.440 --> 01:58:49.520
the better things are. What's the downside? God has given us all these blessings. Let's

01:58:49.520 --> 01:59:00.480
receive them with thanksgiving and share them with others.